About Change Enablement

change enablement is the process of managing changes in a controlled, efficient, and standardized way with the goal of minimizing business risk and maintaining service continuity change enablement assesses any impact or potential risk a proposed change could have on your organization before it is introduced while change enablement manages the process of updating or introducing a new configuration item, release management manages the deployment of those configuration items that are implemented by change enablement change enablement thus works with the release management module to roll out changes in the organization effective change enablement ensures that changes are processed properly during change enablement, you assess any impact or potential risk that a proposed change could have on your organization before that change is introduced during change enablement, you control the lifecycle of all changes and ensure that changes are made with as little disruption to the organization as possible a change is an action that results in a new status for one or more configuration items the goal of change enablement is to ensure that standardized methods and procedures are used to process change requests successful change enablement minimizes the impact of change related issues and improves daily operations after a change has been approved, release management begins the release process, which includes creating a back out plan to return to an operational start point change state transitions a change request is constrained by the different states in its lifecycle for example, after a change is in implemented state, it cannot be reverted to the scheduled state s can take a change through different states and is not constrained by its status driven lifecycle however, we recommend that the change be driven by its lifecycle states an emergency change request is not constrained by state transitions as these types of changes are usually created after the fact, solely for recording purposes your administrator can create additional statuses as needed change approval, planning, and scheduling one of the key principles of change enablement is to ensure that there is approval from key stakeholders to move forward with the change change approvers are sometimes referred to as (cab) members the approval boards set up for change enablement analyze the impact, risks, and cost associated with most types of changes in , standard and minor changes are approved by the and do not require cab, but significant, major, and emergency changes require additional levels of approval the approval workflow set up by default (which can be reconfigured by your administrator) determines whether a change requires additional levels of approval before it can be accepted and scheduled see approving a change request docid 4i6lg6tdxp1e06ekeufkp for more information about the approval process the cab, ecab (emergency cab), and management committee teams determine the risk and cost associated with a potential change in , the risk score allows for an appropriate assessment when approving a change see setting the risk level docid\ tne5dflsi1ffxjaje4pfl when a change is approved, the change is scheduled the can use the change scheduler to schedule the change at a time that will cause the least impact to the organization from the change record itself, the can view which incidents, problem, configuration items (including services), and release the change is linked to, thereby reducing the potential for adversely impacting other configuration items (and services) during the change process the configuration item owner can define lockout periods for the configuration item as well as identify a favorable change window for implementing the configuration item in , the change calendar (see using the change calendar docid\ gcbmocad7pltaqbatxwmm ) and change lockout feature lets the effectively manage changes and reduce impact and other conflicts