Best Practices for Change Management Process

This is to provide Best Practices for Change Management Process. Change requests for Mission Critical or Significant applications, systems that contain or access High Integrity or Very High Integrity data, systems that contain or access Classified or Confidential-Restricted Access information, and infrastructure components that support these applications and systems must be documented via a Reporting Unit approved change request form. That change request form requires approval by the Information Steward or Delegate. The change request form must, at a minimum, contain the following information: 

• Who is initiating the change 
• Who is responsible for implementing the change 
• Who is responsible for the approval 
• Business justification for the change 
• Nature of defect (if applicable) 
• Testing required and who is responsible for the testing 
• Back-out procedures 
• Systems impacted 
• User contact

Applies to

• Information Steward :  approver
• Systems Administrator : logger
• Developer : programmer
• Publisher : publish to production environment
• Users :  User Acceptance testing
• IP Coordinator :  communicates the process to regional/local IP communities