On Wed, Jun 14, 2017 at 3:55 PM, Job Snijders <job@ntt.net> wrote:
On Wed, Jun 14, 2017 at 09:35:59PM +0100, Nick Hilliard wrote:
Graham Johnston wrote:
Would you be able to provide any further insight into your Don’t #5 – “Don’t agree to change management. Managers are rarely engineers and should not be making technical decisions. (nor should sales)“.
What do you think the purpose of change control / management is?
On Wed, Jun 14, 2017 at 09:35:59PM +0100, Nick Hilliard wrote:
What do you think the purpose of change control / management is?
Bureaucratic change control implementations using the ITIL view of change control with a formal CAB are likely an (over)reaction to human mistakes causing outages, most of which could probably be avoided with a simpler less-formal process such as peer or team review. Change control functions as a risk transfer away from operations teams to CAB board members, since if things go wrong b/c of a change: it is now the CAB's fault. There may also be bias towards change-aversity if the CAB cannot be held accountable for issues that come from delaying or rejecting important maintenance. Overall purpose for change control / management, when applied to substantial modifications to an operating environment or configuration of business-critical network/applications is To mitigate possibility of damage/outages from high-impact / high-risk changes made by humans to systems and network-devices by requiring standards of formal written documentation and planning, combined with peer review And approvals by business and technical stakeholders for the maintenance time, including evaluation of exact proposed configuration changes, implementation plans, and backout/contingency plan: for possible errors or omissions. But as with most things can be taken to an unreasonable extreme. The use of change management procedures has a high associated cost, b/c the time and labor to implement even simple relatively low-risk changes can be dramatically increased with an unreasonable delay, and extensive test labs may be necessary. There may actually be increases in various risks, if any kind of maintenance is delayed or lost in the paperwork. -- -JH