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Establishing a Communication Plan

Frequency
• Do you communicate planned changes in a batch on a set schedule or do you only communicate proposed changes when they are approved?
Audience
• Are your change plans communicated to the entire business or are they targeted only to the people who may be impacted by your proposed change?
Communication method
• Do you communicate proposed changes via email or do you post them on a Web portal site?

Establishing a Change Approval Process

Change approval system
• Paper based
• Integrated software
Establishing a Change Approval Process
Change approval
• Meetings
• Schedule
Change request submission procedure
• Who
• Process
Change approval board (CAB)
• Business
• Security
• IT

Planning for Emergency Changes
Emergencies

• Can the emergency change process be used only when business critical systems are unavailable or can you use it when a service reports certain types of errors?
Service level agreements
• How do outages affect your SLA and is there a specific escalation procedure to use when an SLA is not met?
Server downtime
• Can you invoke an emergency change when any server is not functioning or can you only use it if a business critical server is unresponsive?
•Authorization
– Business
– IT
Prior to the release of a change into your production environment you should complete the following tasks:
Develop a release plan
Develop a back-out plan
Perform release testing
Perform rollback testing
Gain final authorization

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