The Change Advisory Council (CAB) can be one of the most important and helpful meetings held by a service-oriented IT organization. It provides an overview of what will happen to the main services in the coming week (or longer depending on the frequency and timeframe), confirms the impact on the business, assesses past change activities and looks at continuous service improvement (CSI).
Ultimately, CAB meetings are all about the people attending them and, if done right, they can really up your game in terms of change communication and buy-in. To help you do this, here are six tips for running your organization's CAB effectively.
1. Set your schedule early
Set a clear scope and agenda for your CAB meetings so that people know what is expected of them. Let's face it - we can all experience meeting overload at some point, so make it easy for your CAB attendees to know what they're doing and why.
The change manager, or the person who chairs the CAB, must ensure that each CAB meeting has a clear agenda (corresponding to the agreed CAB “raison d'être”). This includes:
The review of the changes implemented since the previous CAB. Did something fail, defect or have an unexpected impact? Have incidents been caused by changes? What changes have gone well? Are there opportunities for CSI or new change models?
The retrospective assessment of emergency changes. Did the emergency change go as expected? Was the use of the emergency change workflow appropriate, ie, were the emergency change criteria met? Did the emergency change produce the right results?
The draft change schedule, i.e. the list of changes that require advice and approval from the CAB
Time to discuss any opportunities for Continuous Service Improvement (CSI)
Any other business (AOB)
2. Bait your CAB "Pre-game"
To ensure that your CAB meetings are both efficient and effective, make sure your attendees have a list of suggested changes ahead of time so they can review them and take note of any questions or concerns.
Are your change requests submitted too close to the CAB? Then enter lead times for any CAB routed changes. One approach that we have found to work well for Monday CABs in particular is to send a reminder the Thursday before (or Friday if CAB members have time to view them on Monday) to notify the changing owners. remember to increase their salary. proposed changes by the end of the day. This means that the CAB agenda is set on Monday, everything is discussed on time, people are prepared when necessary and nothing is rushed.
3. Don't be afraid to ask tough questions
Nobody likes to be "that" person. You know the person, the person who is seemingly determined to play "devil's advocate" or find fault with everything. But the reality is, someone has to ask the tricky questions of proposed changes. Some examples are:
"Will there be downtime?"
“What happens if something goes wrong? What is the recovery plan? Do we fix the problem or go back? "
"What if rollback doesn't solve the problem?"
“Is the implementation team empowered to make the decision on remedial action or do we need to escalate at that point? Should we have a senior manager representative on call in case an escalation is needed? "
"Are there any special requirements to consider, such as proximity to business critical periods or other transitional activities?"
Sometimes it's hard to be the person who always has to prepare for the worst possible outcome, but it's much better to get off the change manager than an angry client or senior manager after a failed change.
Also, make sure the IT service desk is present at CAB meetings and they feel comfortable asking questions. If things go wrong, they are the ones who keep a close eye on customer complaints, so make sure they are happy with the content and plan of the change.
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4. Organize activities to 'keep the show moving'
Keep your CAB meetings fast - there's nothing worse than a two-hour CAB meeting in our experience.
We guarantee that if you regularly take your CAB attendees through epic meetings, people will be short of both patience and goodwill. And your job as a change manager is to "keep the show moving".
If all the preparatory work of the CAB has been done and the list of changes circulated in time, representing a change would be one to should last two minutes. All that is needed in most cases is the person representing the change to provide a brief overview of the work planned, mention any risks and confirm that the correct tests have been performed and if additional assistance is needed .
If you notice that each change takes more than ten minutes to be reviewed at the CAB meeting, the impact may not be fully understood, there may be risks that require more planning, or the change may require additional sign-out beyond the CAB, for example business deregistration.
5. Memorize the follow-up tasks after the CAB
After the meeting, send an update email with the CAB minutes. This should include the following:
An overview of the implemented changes and their statuses
An overview of emergency changes
The approved schedule is highlighted
Change reference
Title
Affected services
Downtime (if any)
Implementation data
Implementation teams
Attendance list
Details of any change hold periods
6. Don't forget CSI
As with any other IT service management (ITSM) opportunity, it is necessary to keep moving forward.
So always be open to the possibility of CSI. We've already talked about failed changes, but there is also an option to use these failures as learning points. Keep a log of lessons learned so that ideas for improvement can be recorded, prioritized and acted upon. If a change went exceptionally well, for example ahead of schedule, see if the approach can be modeled or templated. It may not be obvious, but improvements can come from your successes and failures!
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