Change management is the process that ensures effective planning, implementation,
and post-event analysis of changes made to a system. It means that
changes are well documented, have a back-out plan, and are reproducible.
Change management is about managing risk. Changes that SAs make risk outages
for their customers. Change management assesses the risks and manages
them with risk mitigation strategies. There is forward planning for changes,
communication, scheduling, a test plan, a back-out plan, and a set of conditions
that determine whether and when to implement the back-out plan. This
chapter looks at the underlying process; and the following chapters show
how change management applies in various SA scenarios.