As an organization undertakes its journey to the cloud, it must consider the processes that will be impacted, specifically change management and project management. These two important aspects to an IT operating model must be considered with the journey, and changes are usually required to existing policies on how they will be achieved in the cloud. A careful examination of the change management of many organizations will show that while extensive and mature, there are actually many processes in place to slow down the deployment of IT resources, impacting business velocity for the sake of risk mitigation. These processes were not created as a way to slow things down, but, over time, additional bureaucracy is added due to one-off situations or gaps that are identified. These incremental steps accumulate to cause additional approval requirements, lengthier rollback plans, and other activities that impede business agility. This slowdown also had a side effect of ensuring that, before significant capital expenditure was undertaken, lots of analysis was done to ensure proper alignment with project requirements and budgets.

The cloud doesn't remove the need to have strict change management processes. What it does, however, is change how these are implemented in ways that can actually increase their effectiveness, while removing a lot of the bureaucracy that caused the slowdowns to begin with. Cloud native architectures, by their very nature, are less tightly coupled and more services-based, thus removing large big-bang deployments and speeding up the delivery process. Moving to the cloud can remove not only technical debt in the form of obsolete code, but also in removing obsolete processes. For example, ITIL is a common governance and change management style used across lots of enterprise companies, designed to align IT services with the needs of the business. ITIL has strict processes for how changes get implemented, which include documentation, approval chains, rollback plans, and other such activities. These will still exist in the cloud. However, the velocity of change will increase because the size of deployments are often reduced and the risk of these changes is much smaller. This usually is the result of new views of the change management and project management processes of an organization.