ITSM · ITIL
Change management with CAB approvals and rollback plans
Plan and control IT changes safely — standard, normal, or emergency — each with a risk rating, implementation plan, rollback plan, and an approval workflow.
Running in production today: change management on the same engine that powers ITSM approvals.
- Workflow
- What teams can do here
- Step 1
- Raise a change request
- Step 2
- Attach implementation and rollback plans
- Step 3
- Route through CAB approval
- Step 4
- Schedule and track to completion
How it works
Raise the change
Create a change with a title, business justification (reason), risk rating (Low / Medium / High) and impact rating, and choose its type: Standard (pre-approved), Normal (needs CAB) or Emergency. Each change is auto-numbered (CHG-00001, CHG-00002…).
Attach the plans
Document the implementation plan, rollback plan and test plan, set planned start and end times, and link the affected assets, related incidents and the problem this change resolves.
Route through CAB approval
Submitting a Standard change moves it straight to Approved because it is pre-approved; anything else goes to Under Review for the Change Advisory Board. CAB members record a decision with their role and a comment — and recording a CAB decision is an admin-only action.
Approve or block
Any single rejection cancels the change; once there is at least one approval and no pending decisions left, the change advances to Approved. Approvals are captured individually so you can see who signed off and why.
Schedule, execute and track
Transition the change through Scheduled, In Progress and finally Completed, Failed or Rolled Back — actual start and end times are stamped automatically. A change-calendar view lists upcoming scheduled changes so you can see what is landing and when.
A worked example
Say a hospital group's IT team raises a firewall firmware upgrade as a Normal change, rated High risk, with the appliance asset attached and implementation, rollback and test plans documented up front. On submit it moves to Under Review; the network lead and the security lead each record a CAB decision with a comment. Both approve, so with nothing left pending the change advances to Approved and is scheduled into a 2am Saturday window — visible on the change calendar beside that weekend's other work. Execution moves it to In Progress, stamping the actual start; after verification it is transitioned to Completed. Had the upgrade gone wrong, Rolled Back would have stamped the end for the record.
Built around real workflows
Highlights below describe capabilities already present in the protected app behind this page.
- 01
- Standard, normal (CAB) and emergency change types
- 02
- Risk and impact scoring
- 03
- Implementation and rollback plans
- 04
- Draft → review → approved → scheduled → completed workflow
- Product proof
- Already live in the product
- Backed by app modules
- Protected app route: /change-management
Frequently asked questions
See also: Problem management · CMDB & configuration · Blog: What is patch management? · Blog: The IT asset lifecycle · Incident management
Ship risky changes with the rollback already written
CAB approvals where one rejection stops the train, pre-attached implementation and rollback plans, and a forward change calendar — governance that leaves a who-approved-what trail.