Poor change control can significantly impact the project in terms of scope, cost, time, risk, and benefits. Therefore, it is crucial that the CCB members are sufficiently equipped with information, experience, and support necessary to make the best decisions. The Change Control Board and the Change Advisory Board are similar organizational structures play vital roles in decision making. Both are comprised of teams whose role is to collectively help the organization make the right decisions of balancing need and risk of changes to technology that supports business processes, but they’re not the same. The Change Control Board will review any proposed changes from the original baseline requirements that were agreed upon with the client. If any change is agreed upon by the committee, the change is communicated to the project team and the client, and the requirement is baselined with the change.

When a number of changes have accumulated, the TWG recommends a new DM2 baseline version be established and released. Upon, approval by the CCB, the new DM2 is published along with a record of changes from last baseline and a new working copy is setup. Depending on the typical activity in your IT department, your CAB may meet as often as twice weekly. No matter the frequency of meetings, the Change Manager should communicate the scheduled change required well in advance of meetings, so individuals on the CAB are prepared to make the best decisions.

How a Change Advisory Board makes decisions

Configuration management (CM) is a process of identifying, tracking, and controlling changes to the configuration items (CIs) that make up a system or product. A configuration control board (CCB) is a group of stakeholders that reviews and approves proposed changes to the CIs, ensuring that they are aligned with the project objectives, requirements, and standards. CCB meetings and reviews are essential for effective CM, but they can also be challenging, time-consuming, and prone to conflicts. One of the most difficult aspects of CCB meetings and reviews is effectively managing conflicts and expectations among the CCB members and other stakeholders.

• A Change Control Board (CCB), also known as the configuration control board, is a group of individuals, mostly found in software-related projects.
• Each Architectural Description effort must establish a CM process and document it in a CM Plan.
• One of the most difficult aspects of CCB meetings and reviews is effectively managing conflicts and expectations among the CCB members and other stakeholders.
• Ultimately, seeking win-win solutions that balance the needs and interests of all parties involved while maintaining the project objectives is key.
• Both are comprised of teams whose role is to collectively help the organization make the right decisions of balancing need and risk of changes to technology that supports business processes, but they’re not the same.
• The Change Control Board and the Change Advisory Board are similar organizational structures play vital roles in decision making.

The CAB must also look for conflicting requests—these cases in particular require CAB members to maintain holistic, business-outcomes views that don’t favor the particular team or individual seeking the change. The Change Control Board and Change Advisory Board share a similar focus of reviewing and making decisions for change requests, though their scopes vary widely. Regardless of differences, the structure for both change bodies must be clear, effective, and efficient.

What does CCB mean?

IT service management has long suffered from bureaucratic approaches and general risk aversion—which results in layers of approvals, development delays and confusion, and, ultimately, failure to deliver value to customers in an agile manner. This situation is exacerbated in companies with legacy systems and structures that prohibit the flexibility for change that digital transformation requires. DM2 change requests (action items) can be raised by any of the working group members or flow down from the CCB. A working copy of the DM2 is maintained, along with all reference and research materials and the current action item tracker. DM2 issues impacting the foundation are forwarded to the International Defense Enterprise Architecture Specification (IDEAS) Group for consideration.

Conflicts can arise due to varying perspectives, interests, preferences, or priorities for change requests, and expectations can differ based on the scope, complexity, urgency, or feasibility of the change requests. To manage these conflicts and expectations adequately, it is important to establish clear ground rules and guidelines for the CCB meetings and reviews, such as roles, responsibilities, procedures, criteria, and deadlines. Additionally, encouraging respectful and constructive dialogue between the CCB members and other stakeholders is essential; personal attacks, blame, or criticism should be avoided. Acknowledging and addressing any concerns or issues raised by the CCB members and other stakeholders should also be done while providing evidence, rationale, and alternatives where possible.

Creating a Change Advisory Board

Before you start any CCB meeting or review, make sure that everyone involved knows their roles and responsibilities. The CCB typically consists of a chairperson, a secretary, and representatives from various functional areas, such as engineering, testing, quality, customer, and management. The representatives review the change requests, provide feedback, and vote on the approval or rejection of the changes. Clarifying the roles and responsibilities of each CCB member helps to avoid confusion, duplication, and delays.

A change request is a formal document that describes the proposed change, its rationale, its impact, its priority, and its dependencies. Supporting documents may include technical specifications, design drawings, test results, ccb configuration control board risk assessments, cost estimates, and customer feedback. Preparing these documents ahead of time ensures that the CCB has all the information it needs to evaluate the change request and make an informed decision.

Evaluate and improve the CCB performance

Ultimately, seeking win-win solutions that balance the needs and interests of all parties involved while maintaining the project objectives is key. Lastly, communicating the CCB decisions clearly and promptly to all relevant stakeholders with explanations of reasons and implications will help foster trust, cooperation, and satisfaction among all involved. Another key to successful CCB meetings and reviews is to prepare the change requests and supporting documents in advance.

The organization’s change management policy will define the CAB’s constitution and its scope, which can include anything from proposals and deployments to changes to roles and documentation. Organizations may choose to have a single CCB handling change requests across multiple projects. A low-level CCB could handle lower priority change requests, for instance non-customer-facing features or changes with low/no cost impact. A higher-level CCB could tackle major change requests that have significant impact on costs or customer.

Providing Customer-Centric Solutions Through Partnerships

When it comes to management and control of changes to services and service components, one of the biggest challenges is determining who has the authority to make change decisions. Consistent with the federated architecture approach described in Section 3, essential architectural information must be registered with DARS so that discovery of reusable architectural data can be accomplished throughout the Department. Learn how ServiceOps can help you predict change risks using service and operational data, support cross-functional collaboration to solve problems, and automatically recommend problem resolutions. In some projects the CCB may also be responsible for verifying that approved changes are implemented. These CM activities are complementary with existing DoD CM processes for the DARS, the DoD Information Technology Standards Registry (DISR), and the Metadata Registry (MDR). A more comprehensive description of the overall CM Process is found online in the DoDAF Journal.

The authority of the Change Control Board may vary from project to project (see e.g. Consensus-based decision making), but decisions reached by the Change Control Board are often accepted as final and binding. Appropriate evaluation criteria should be developed in the CM Plan and applied according to the scope and tier of the Architectural Description effort. The evaluation criteria must include factors that test compliance with the Net-Centric Reference Architectures and the DoD IE as outlined in Section 3.0 of the DoDAF and the Net-Centric Guidance contained in Volume 2. The results of architecture evaluations should be used to guide decisions for approving proposed changes, as well as in planning future extensions or updates to the Architectural Description.

Thanks for your feedback

In conclusion, using the right tools and techniques can significantly improve the quality, speed, and accuracy of CCB decisions. Factors affecting a CCB’s decision can include the project’s phase of development, budget, schedule, and https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ quality goals. The CCB may, from time to time, establish technical working groups (TWG), as required, to oversee, review, and make recommendations to the board on specific technical aspects of the CM Program, or configuration items.