Welcome to Series 2, Episode 6! Angus and Pete explore the dreaded Change Freeze, a vital IT strategy often implemented during peak periods like Christmas. The discussion was prompted by a listener who had a travel nightmare due to a systems upgrade that went wrong during the busiest time of the year. The hosts delve into what the freeze is, why it's critical for service stability, and how poor planning can lead to the infamous "mad dash" effect.
Here are the key show notes from the discussion:
• The Purpose of a Change Freeze: A change freeze is a predefined period where non-essential changes to systems are halted, acting as a safeguard for system integrity and availability. This is critical during periods of massive demand, such as Christmas, when high operational demands coincide with limited staff availability.
• The Risk of the "Mad Dash": A disadvantage of long freezes is the "mad dash effect," where teams rush to cram everything in beforehand. This pressure can lead to poor decisions and mistakes, inadvertently introducing the bugs that the freeze was intended to prevent.
• Planning and Communication are Key: To prevent chaos, planning must start early—around June or July for Christmas—ensuring all stakeholders are aware, including customer service leadership. Clear, simple, non-technical language should be used to communicate key dates and expectations.
• Prioritizing the Customer: Companies should be transparent with customers about issues, using banner notices or updated holding messages, as transparency can make people "far more willing to work with you". Stable, protected systems allow agents to focus on complex, high-emotion issues and turn problems into "nice experiences".
• Measuring True Success: Success criteria for a freeze should not rely solely on meaningless metrics like system uptime. Instead, organizations must focus on customer experience metrics like First Contact Resolution (FCR), Customer Effort Scores, and customer complaints, which truly reflect the outcome of the stability effort.