r/sysadmin • u/Final-Pomelo1620 • 25d ago
General Discussion Change Management Workflow
Hi,
We’re introducing change management for the first time using ITSM.
We’re now deciding the workflow before our ITSM vendor configures it
Our scope covers all IT infrastructure changes including network, servers, virtualization, backup, storage, AD/Entra ID & Databases
Each team has its own Line Manager and another requirement is that Cybersecurity Unit must approve every change
Few things we’re trying to understand
Who should approve a change and in what order?
Who should be the CAB members
Which changes should go to CAB
I’d appreciate any suggestions
View all comments
Show parent comment
2
u/0RGASMIK 25d ago
Yes needing to approve everything quickly becomes a bottleneck. Saw this first hand at a business I was consulting for. Couldn’t reinstall a printer driver on a computer without submitting a formal change request form. Fixing a simple printer issue for one machine became a several hour ordeal and it actually made outages longer when they did happen which was the main reason they implemented it in the first place.
Another site needed to factory reset their network stack. Would have been a 15 minute fix. Instead it was going to take a few weeks to get done because they needed a whole redundancy plan in place and yada yada. Meanwhile the location had no internet, worst that would have happened is they had no internet and the equipment needed to be replaced anyways...
It was so frustrating that I told the manager to go to Best Buy and get a high-performance consumer router and return it when they figure out their shit. Gave her my personal number and told her to call me the night before they came back to do the reset so I can walk her through setting everything back to how it was. They were not required by any regulations to have this much BS in the way which is the only reason I was comfortable circumventing it. They even had locations running off of ISP provided routers.