Should you abolish your Change Advisory Board?

[SimonMorris]

Glenn O'Donnell asks a question on the Forrester discussion board

Should you abolish your Change Advisory Board?

A major criticism of IT's inability to serve the demands of cloud computing is the extreme of being too rigid. It takes too long to implement the changes needed to be adaptive. Such criticism is warranted because change management is indeed too slow. Does this sound familiar? In an interesting and disturbing paradox, we see far too many organizations that are on BOTH extremes simultaneously!

The main culprit of inflexible change - in my opinion - is the Change Advisory Board (CAB). The CAB is an anachronism. It has become a speed bump in the journey to cloud flexibility. Those on the CAB are often power-hungry narcissists who merely want to impose their control over the process instead of serving the needs of the business. Regardless of the makeup of the CAB, they are also clueless about the realities involved. The world has gotten far too complex for this panel to make any trustworthy judgement calls. Even the best and brightest technologists are losing grasp of this complexity. The CAB rarely includes such people, thus even further diminishing the CAB's insight to reality.

I've experienced some of his frustrations in the past - ranging from the "Quick, let's get it over with" mentality of some CAB attendees to the "Well, If I'm on the CAB I'd better have an objection to at least ONE change!" other extreme.

Having a CAB as your ONLY method of approving changes isn't scalable. I tried to articulate this in my post "Do Change Management a favour: Rank your changes" but I didn't get my point across as well as I would have liked.

A monolithic Change Advisory Board meeting, held once a week doesn't scale. One performance indicator, for organisations that are improving their process, is that more changes are run through the board - either as your spread the process further afield in your organisations, or you start to broaden the scope of the process.

Having the same group of individuals reviewing a long list of changes doesn't make the process flexible or fluid enough. Here I agree with Glenn.

Is it the right time to "abandon the CAB"? I really hope not. When it's done well a Change Advisory Board can bring together different view points, different representations and ultimately allows the business to express an opinion on what the impact of a change might be.

The best approach must be a combination of approval methods

• A process for low risk, repeatable (Standard) changes
• A system for accurately and systematically ranking changes according to a risk profile
• Electronic approvals using a majority system, or selecting the right approver based on Business service
• CAB meetings to review the changes that really need it

Using a combination of approval methods we can get the CAB reviewing the right changes, rather than just going through the process, or worse holding it up.

ServiceNow has made a big step forward in the Apsen release with Change Management Collision Detector (read my previous post on this) and our Change Risk calculator but there's still a long way we can go to make the approval process more streamlined.

Also check out the IT Skeptics response to the same post: Abolish the CAB at your peril