The Practice of System and Network Administration, Second Edition

Chapter 17. Change Management

Change management is the process that ensures effective planning, implementation, and post-event analysis of changes made to a system. It means that changes are well documented, have a back-out plan, and are reproducible. Change management is about managing risk. Changes that SAs make risk outages for their customers. Change management assesses the risks and manages them with risk mitigation strategies. There is forward planning for changes, communication, scheduling, a test plan, a back-out plan, and a set of conditions that determine whether and when to implement the back-out plan. This chapter looks at the underlying process; and the following chapters show how change management applies in various SA scenarios. ...