Change Management

Summary

Change management is a policy to provide visibility of changes to a product, service, configuration, or technology. Change requests are a way to provide auditing and risk assesments for chaning systems.

Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) Configuration Management Model

• Service asset are things, process, or people who contribute to the delivery of an IT service.
• A configuration item (CI) is an asset that requires specific managmement procedures for it to be used to deliver the service.
• Configuration baselines are the settings that should be applied to the CI to ensure secure and reliable operation.
• Performance baselines are metrics for expected performance to provide a basis for comparison for ongoing monitoring of a CI.

Change Requests

Change requiests can be auto-generated for audit tracking and compliance purposes are they can be created by individuals.

Each Request for Request (RFC) should document

• What is changing.
• What team requested the change.
• When the change needs to happen.
• If there is any impact such as downtime of services and the window of downtime expected.
• Approvals/Sign Offs required by any managers or team members.
• Owner of change, whom needs to perform the changes.
• Description of changes, requirements, attachements, screenshots, links to other services or tools, etc.
• Any rollback procedures that can be taken to reduce outages
• Any risks that may be associated with the changes.
• Severity of changes (minor, major, mitigated)