A STUDY OF ROLE OF CHANGE MANAGEMENT IN REDUCING SERVICE DISRUPTIONS IN THE IT INDUSTRY: PUNE REGION

The IT industry operates in a highly dynamic environment characterized by frequent application releases, infrastructure upgrades, security patches, and configuration changes. While change is essential for innovation, poorly planned or uncontrolled changes frequently lead to service disruptions, outages, degraded performance, and customer dissatisfaction. Change Management is a key IT Service Management (ITSM) practice intended to evaluate risk, approve changes through governance mechanisms, ensure adequate testing and rollback readiness, and implement changes in a controlled manner. This study evaluates the perceived role of change management in reducing service disruptions in IT organizations in the Pune region. A survey-based approach was used with a structured questionnaire of 15 Likert-scale statements administered to 100 IT professionals. Findings indicate strong agreement for core change controls such as structured change processes, rollback readiness, and communication. Moderate agreement is observed for maturity-dependent areas such as CMDB/service mapping accuracy, emergency change governance, and automation coverage. Chi-Square (χ²) Goodness-of-Fit testing shows that key response distributions are statistically significant and strongly skewed toward agreement, supporting the study hypotheses. The study concludes that disciplined change management plays a significant role in improving service stability and reducing disruptions, while highlighting maturity enablers required to improve outcomes further.