Change Management : The CAB

The « Change Advisory Board » is a board of people in charge of giving advice about the changes on the IT Production. Clear enough?

Years ago, IT Teams changed what they wanted and when they wanted on the IT Production. This often led to some “discomfort” for the end-users.

Even between IT Teams, changes were routinely mismanaged (yes: more than now sometimes): network teams changed IPs without warning, mainframe teams decided an IPL at 10:15am, DBA teams cleared tables around 04:56 pm… And the like.

One of ITIL “best practices” is to introduce this body of representative people.

Thus, the “official ITIL definition” is:

An authoritative and representative group of people who are responsible for assessing, from both a business and a technical viewpoint (wow!), all high impact Requests for Change (RFCs). They advise Change Management on the priorities of RFCs and propose allocations of resources to implement those Changes. The Change Advisory Board (CAB) will be made up of Customer (what? who?), User (gosh!) and IT representatives, and may also include, depending upon the nature of the Changes being considered, 3rd party and other administrative business representatives (argl!). The CAB is chaired by the Change Manager.

You see, real people and nerds, in the same room, trying to speak the same language. Sounds crazy, hu ?

So the IT Teams had to learn some kind of new “vernacular communication mediums” (words) to be understood by their counterparts who, in turn, tried to plunge into the abysses of IT vocabulary.

Sometimes, this leads to curious situations, with IT teams trying to “hide” a change under a somewhat curious terminology… But of course, this is always for the best reasons!