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Change-management overhaul at a leading global travel platform

Leading global travel platform · North America HQ · ~$2-3B revenue · Three-phase ITIL change-management assessment, evaluation, and tactical roadmap

The situation

A leading global travel-distribution platform was navigating a difficult window: NDC adoption forcing structural changes, airlines moving to direct distribution, post-merger system complexity, and a substantial COVID-era workforce reduction. Change management had become both a bottleneck and a credibility problem. CAB approvals were rubber-stamped, exception rates were high, modern teams were quietly working around the formal process, and incident reviews kept finding the same root causes.

The Global Technology Operations VP needed an objective, evidence-based assessment that the executive team would trust. Not a CMDB clean-up, not another framework rollout, a credible answer to: "where is our change process actually broken, and which fixes will move the needle in the next two quarters versus the next two years?"

Stakeholders across change, ops, security, application teams, and compliance had different (and incompatible) views of what was wrong. Any recommendation that did not move from opinion to data would not survive the executive review.

What we did

  1. Phase 1: Current-state assessment. Document review across the formal change-management process, standard-change catalog, and incident reviews. Stakeholder interviews across change, ops, app teams, security, and modern delivery teams. CAB observation. Mapped findings to ITIL change-enablement maturity dimensions and produced a preliminary set of recommendations.
  2. Phase 2: Quantitative evaluation against industry benchmarks. Pulled validated operational data and benchmarked against ITIL change-success-rate norms and DORA metrics (deployment frequency, lead time, change-failure rate, MTTR). Built a transparent cost-savings calculation methodology so every figure was traceable back to source data.
  3. Phase 3: Strategic and tactical roadmap. Synthesized 187 specific process gaps into a prioritized roadmap. Tactical track: developer-ready specs for ServiceNow risk-scoring, CAB redesign, standard-change expansion. Strategic track: operating-model recommendations for a unified change experience across modern and legacy teams.
  4. Executive readouts at the end of every phase. Three exec readouts (one per phase), with meeting minutes and recorded executive validation of findings before moving to the next phase. The point was not to hold theatrical readouts; it was to keep the executive sponsor co-owning the analysis as it took shape.

Outcomes

What was hard

The hardest part was not the analysis. It was holding the line on evidence-first findings while several stakeholder groups had pre-existing positions they wanted the assessment to validate. Phase 1 delivered findings several leaders did not want to hear, and the engagement only survived because the executive sponsor had been brought into the methodology at the start. Lesson: when an assessment will produce uncomfortable findings, the time to socialize the methodology is at the beginning, not at the readout.

A second tension: the modern delivery teams were already operating closer to DORA-elite metrics than the formal change process suggested was possible. The roadmap had to honor that reality without endorsing the parallel-process workaround that had grown up around it. We landed on a unified change experience with risk-tiered fast paths, but defining "risk" in a way that the security and audit functions would accept took most of phase 3.

Selected artifacts

Public-cleansed templates and frameworks drawn from engagements like this one are in our resources library.

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