Why Do You Still Have a Change Advisory Board?

Have you ever asked yourself why do we still have Change Advisory Board (CAB) meetings? It has been 15 years since the financial crisis of 2008 that spawned the widespread adoption of CABs; yet, here we are still doing what we have done for the last 15 years. Time and technology have caught up to us. We can retire our CAB meetings.

Death to CABs

CABs were created for 2 primary reasons:  1) to support the separation of duties requirement where the same person cannot be the builder, approver, and implementer, and 2) to crowdsource CMDB information. But how effective has this been over the years? Changes have still been made that have crippled organisations. Early in my consulting career, I was a guest attendee at a Fortune 500-level company’s CAB meeting. They had over 100 attendees and over 50 changes to review in a 1.5-hour meeting held once a week. After the meeting, the Change Manager bragged about how effective the meeting was. Now in hindsight, I wonder "was it really cost-effective though?" Using quick math - 100 attendees, 50 meetings per year, 1.5-hour meeting duration - the annual cost of the CAB, on the conservative side, is calculated to be $750,000! That's without factoring in opportunity costs. How many of the 50 changes were pushed out because the impact couldn't be assessed? How many of these changes still failed or caused failure anyway? It all begs the question - if these CAB meetings are so expensive then why are organisations still doing them?

But I Can't Rid of CABs 

Yes, you can get rid of your CABs. I bet if you asked around your IT department, most of your peers loathe these meetings. CAB meetings had their place in the early 2010s, but as organisations have moved away from shared infrastructure, adopted cloud technologies, and started managing their CMDB, the need to crowdsource impact information has waned. Yes, we still need to meet the separation of duties obligation, but we no longer need CABs to do so. By using ServiceNow, we can leverage the information captured by the platform to make more intelligent decisions. For example, we have CMDB data, Change Success Rate, Application Performance, and Error Budget information available to inform our Change Management processes. We no longer need to sit in an hour-long meeting to run through a list of changes. We have the ability to capture the necessary approvals outside of these meetings in a manner that is much more flexible and dynamic. If COVID has taught us anything, it is that forced collaboration is not collaboration at all.

How Thirdera Can Help

We understand that transformation does not happen overnight. We can work with your organisation to modernise your Change Approval process, update your CMDB, and streamline your DevOps practices so that your IT department can keep up with your business’s demands. 15 years has been long enough – it’s time to retire CABs.

If you are interested in hearing more, connect with us on social or contact us to speak with a trained expert.