Change is Inevitable on the Plant Floor. The Question Is: Will It Be Controlled?

Who Moved My Control System? 

In industrial facilities, change is often met with resistance and pushback. These experiences with change can be characterized similarly to the way the characters in the story Who Moved My Cheese? experience their maze: something has shifted, the "cheese" isn't where it used to be, and people respond with a mix of anticipation, resistance, and reluctant adaptation. 

On the plant floor, your "cheese" is safety, uptime, product quality, and compliance. The maze is your industrial control system (ICS): PLCs, HMIs, networks, historians, and the people and processes around them. That maze is changing whether you like it or not, especially as cybersecurity threats evolve. The real question is whether those changes are disciplined and predictable, or ad hoc and risky. 

At Interstates, we've learned that how you manage change in operational technology (OT) is one of the biggest levers you have to reduce unplanned downtime and quietly improve your cybersecurity posture at the same time. 

Why Change Management Is a Reliability Issue First 

When plant managers hear “change management,” they often think of paperwork, downtime, and red tape. In practice, effective OT change management is a reliable tool.

Unmanaged or poorly managed changes are behind many of the issues that keep you up at night:

• A "minor" logic tweak that trips a line and creates hours of scrap
• A firmware update that breaks communication to downstream devices
• An HMI change that introduces a hidden interlock and slows operators down
• A vendor who "just fixes something" remotely and leaves no record 

In each case, the technical action isn't the problem. The problem is that no one can answer three simple questions confidently: 

1. What exactly changed?
2. Who changed it, and why?
3. Can we safely roll it back? 

When those answers aren’t clear, troubleshooting takes longer, production risk goes up, and the plant absorbs the cost.

A right-sized OT change process flips that script. It ensures that when changes occur, they’re intentional, thoroughly tested, documented, and recoverable. That translates directly into fewer surprises and faster recovery when things don’t go as planned.

Cyber Threats Are Forcing the Issue 

While reliability is often the immediate pain, cybersecurity can be an overall forcing function. You can't ignore operating system patches, HMI and historian updates, password changes, or remote access control and still claim to be managing cyber risk. 

Threats are evolving quickly: 

• Attackers are exploiting remote access and weak credentials
• Unpatched engineering workstations and HMIs are common footholds
• Configuration drift makes it difficult to know what "normal" looks like 

In this context, standing still is not safe. You must change by patching, hardening, and improving, without introducing new instability. That's where a disciplined OT change method becomes essential. It gives you a way to make cyber-driven changes with the same rigor you apply to process safety or quality. 

A Proven Method for OT Change on the Plant Floor 

Interstates recommends a practical, risk-based approach to OT change management that fits the realities of day-to-day operations. At a high level, every change follows a simple, repeatable path: 

1. Request - Clearly define what is changing, why, and which assets are affected.
2. Assess - Evaluate safety, quality, production, and cyber impact, and classify the risk.
3. Approve - Route the change to the right approvers based on that risk, not based on guesswork.
4. Prepare - Capture current backups, define a rollback plan, communicate timing, and, where possible, test in a lab or simulator.
5. Implement - Execute during an agreed change window with appropriate permits and remote access controls.
6. Verify - Confirm the system functions as intended and, for cyber-related changes, that the vulnerability is actually remediated.
7. Close - Store evidence, update your asset inventory, and capture lessons learned. 

Done well, this process doesn't slow you down. For low-risk changes, it can be fast and lightweight. High-risk changes get more scrutiny. That balance keeps people from working around the process. 

Making Change Easier—and Measurable 

The characters in Who Moved My Cheese? respond to change in different ways; some are quick to act, others hesitate or resist. You see the same mix on the plant floor: proactive technicians, skeptical operators, and leaders worried about disruption. 

The answer is to make it easier to do the right thing and to measure the impact over time. A few practical KPIs help plant leaders keep score: 

• Monthly unplanned downtime hours linked to changes.
  • Track how many hours of downtime are caused by implemented changes (logic, firmware, configuration, patches). A realistic goal is to see a steady reduction over 6-12 months as your process matures.
• Number of rollbacks needed during changes.
  • Rollbacks are not failures; they're proof that your team had a safe way to back out. Early on, you might see several rollbacks as you tighten testing. Over time, you should see fewer rollbacks—but every significant change should still have a tested rollback option.
• Percentage of OT changes with verified backups.
  • Aim for nearly 100% of control-system changes to have a current, tested backup before implementation. 

These kinds of metrics provide a clear view of whether your OT change process is actually improving reliability and managing risk, or just adding overhead. 

To support these KPIs, focus on enablers that make change easier, not harder: 

• Automated backups and version control for PLC, HMI, and DCS programs
• Simple, consistent forms for requesting and approving changes
• Clear roles and responsibilities so no one wonders who owns what
• Regular but brief change huddles so operations, maintenance, and OT stay aligned
• Vendor guardrails that require tickets, approvals, and evidence for every remote change. 

When people see that the process protects them by helping them recover quickly, avoid blame, and keep production running, they're far more willing to "move with the cheese." 

Where to Start 

You don't need to overhaul your entire plant to see benefits. Many facilities start with three focused steps: 

1. Automate backups and define a rollback expectation for critical control assets.
2. Pilot a simple OT change request and approval workflow on one line or area.
3. Hold a short weekly change review to look ahead at planned changes and look back at what happened. 

Change on the plant floor is inevitable. The choice is whether that change is a source of chaos or a controlled, reliable way to improve both uptime and security. Interstates helps industrial facilities put a proven OT change method in place so they can move with the cheese confidently, safely, and with fewer surprises. 

If you're seeing unplanned downtime or feeling increasing pressure from cyber-driven changes, it may be time to take a fresh look at how change happens in your control systems. 

Have questions or want to learn more? Contact us today!