"Change authority" vs. CAB

[jf]

What is the difference between "Change authority" and "Change Advisory Board"?

The official definitions are "A group that is given the authority to approve Change, e.g. by a project board. Sometimes referred to as the Configuration Board." and "A group of people who can give expert advice to Change Management on the implementation of Changes. This Board is likely to be made up of representatives from all areas within IT and representatives from business units.

This would suggest that the CAB is Advisory only, as its name says. Yet ITIL documentaiton also says that a CAB must be convened to approve RFCs!

Any ideas on the difference would be appreciated.

[Roger]

Another classic example of "it can mean whatever you define it to mean" and the continuing challenge of 'semantics'.

I suggest that if you look at when a CAB meeting is held (from the text it indicates that a CAB (physical) meeting does not happen on a regular basis), then it would be fair to say that the CAB is more strategic and looking at changes that could potentially change the face of the infrastructure or some important component of it.

With this in mind, don't forget that there will most likely still be a place for the traditional weekly change mangement meeting in most organizations.

Also, as per your definitions, the CAB is generally made up of those people that will have a contribution to make with respect to the change itself.

The Change Authority may be a group of people that look at the performance of the business, other projects demanding attention, external factors and then make decisions about change from that perspective.

In summary, and already stated, there are no hard and fast rules. It will be what you decide and that will be based on your own experiences and knowledge of the organization you're looking at.

[manish]

Though there can be many derivations of the definitions I would like to present my views on this one.

Change Advisory Board comprises of Domain Experts from Operational, Finance, Business etc domains. The impact of the change is discussed by the CAB for High/Medium impact changes. If CAB is convinced only then the change can be approved else it is rejected.

When we talk about Change Authority, CAB is one of the Change Authority to approve the changes which are presented to them, if a Change is not a High/Medium impact change, the Change Manager would not want to involve CAB for approval. Hence in this case the Change Authority is different than CAB.

I hope this helps....

[BorisBear]

[Timo]

We did something similar with one of our clients where we used CAB to approve a need for change (business approval) and Change Manager would authorize deployment of change.