This document discusses change and release management. It describes the goals of ensuring changes are handled consistently and minimizing risk. Well-planned change management is important to avoid 80% of outages caused by people and process issues. The document outlines normal, standard, and emergency change types and key roles in the change management process like the global change manager, change approvers, and change advisory boards. It provides details on the steps for different change types.

1. Change and Release
Management

2. Change Management
Overview
Roles and Responsibilities
Normal Change Steps
Other Change Types
Supporting Tools

3. Description and Goal
• Description
• Addition, modification or removal of any hardware, software or network
component that could have an effect on IT services and/or computerized
systems.
• Process responsible for controlling the lifecycle of all changes to minimize the
risk of disruption to IT services
• Goal
• Ensure Changes to the services and underlying technology managed by IT are
handled in a consistent, controlled, and compliant manner to reduce the risk
and impact to the business while maintaining efficiency, effectiveness, and
timely delivery

4. Importance of Well Planned Change
Management
“Through 2015, 80% of outages impacting mission-critical services will
be caused by people and process issues, and more than 50% of those
outages will be caused by Change/
Configuration/Release integration and hand-off issues.”
"80% of unplanned outages are due to ill-planned Changes made by
administrators (‘operations staff’) or developers."

5. Purpose
• Reduces the likelihood of outages, failures, rework, frustrated stakeholders
• Avoids undermining the stability and integrity of the changed environment
• Facilitates coordination, communication, and overall awareness of the
activities happening
• Simplifies troubleshooting and service restoration
• Ensures change are appropriately planned, reviewed, approved, and
documented
• Supports adherence to regulatory requirements

6. Types of Changes
• Normal
• Planned Change that is built, and tested prior to being implemented
• There are times, typically infrastructure related, that do not required a build
and test phase
• Standard
• Pre-authorized Change that is low risk, relatively common, and follows a pre-
defined procedure or work instruction
• Emergency
• Created to assist in the resolution of a Priority 1 or 2 Incident

7. Change and Release Management
Overview
Roles and Responsibilities
Normal Change Steps
Other Change Types
Supporting Tools

8. Key Roles
• Global Change and Release Manager
• Change and Release Manager
• Change and Release Coordinator
• Assignment Group
• Service CAB
• Global CAB
• ECAB
• Approvers

9. • Creating, maintaining, and improving the process
• Monitoring compliance of the process through regular audits
• Chairing the Global CAB meetings
• Ensuring the outcomes of the process line up with business objectives
Global Change and Release
Manager

10. Change and Release Manager
• Confirm inclusion of affected CIs, risks assessment, identification of all
stakeholders and implementation tasks are defined and appropriate
• Determine need for build and test phase and if Change can go through the
phase
• Submit Changes for approval
• Approve Standard Change
• Review executed Emergency Changes
• Conduct Post Implementation Reviews
• Approve Changes to be closed
• Create approvals for compliance groups for Changes to regulated systems

11. Change and Release Co-ordinator
• Determine the type of Change required
• Create and oversee Normal, Standard and Emergency Changes
• Create plan, build/test, and deploy Tasks
• Coordinate and overseeing all activities and resources throughout the
life of Changes
• Creating Child Changes
• Provide input into the Post Implementation Review

12. CAB Groups
• Service CAB
• Review Changes that are High or Very High risk, but only impact their
service/functional area
• Global CAB
• Review Changes that are High or Very High risk that impact across multiple
services or have wide spread impact on a weekly basis
• ECAB
• Review and approve emergency Change requests that are intended to assist
in the resolution of a Priority 1 or 2 incident

13. Standard – Documented , Low risk
• A pre-authorized Change that is low risk, relatively common, and
follows a pre-defined procedure or work instruction
• A repeatable activity and may also be referred to as “a housekeeping
change”
• Before a Standard Change can be approved as a Standard Change, it
must first follow the Normal Change flow successfully
• Unless agreed upon by all impacted parties, Standard Changes must
not have a backout plan or implementation plan which may impact a
live production system/service

14. Emergency Change
• Emergency Changes are required to assist in the resolution of a
Priority 1 or 2 Incident
• Emergency changes must be opened and approved by the ECAB prior
to implementing the Change
• ECAB is assigned based on the Assignment Group of the CI
• Notifications will be sent to impacted CIs just as they would for any
other Change
• Once the Change is approved, the Change and Release Coordinator
has 24 hours to document the complete details of the Change and
submit for retrospective review