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The Itil Community Forum: Forums
ITIL :: View topic - Change Freeze - How, When and Why it needs to be implemented
Posted: Thu Aug 18, 2005 10:00 pm Post subject: Change Freeze
Change freezes can be used in many ways. Generally speaking ITIL recommends that a change freeze is imposed during business critical activities, these activities are likely to be different for each organisation but could include, Monthly billing runs, Invoice printing, Batch processing jobs or alternatively high profile customer facing activities.
You would impose a Change Freeze in order to avoid any Changes taking place that could potentially have an adverse effect on the Infrastructure which supports the business critical process.
Some organisations that have a scheduled change freeze on the Business Critical Services from 08:00 to 18:00 every working day, so as to minimise disruption throughout the working day.
As for the when, that would depend largely on what information you have from the business, ideally you would have a calendar of business events well ahead of schedule where you could identify times and dates when change freezes are required, this way everyone knows well in advance that they will not be able to make changes at that time and can therefore plan around them.
Other reasons to call for a change freeze, could be prior to a major release to ensure stability during the release, prior to and during an audit, after a major release or a major change to ensure that the release or change has had the desired effect without other changes muddying the waters.
I am sure that there are other reasons to implement a change freeze that would be suitable for other organisations.
A Change Freeze is called for one reason: to protect the IT infrastructure, application and/or other business activities from any Change activity that may undermine its stability and operation.
The most common times I've seen Change Freezes in action are when a major Change has just been implemented and time is required to monitor the impact of the Change on the infratsructure or affected application. the Change Freeze may be infrastructure-wide (nationally or global) or specific to an application.
The other times I've seen Change Freezes called is over holiday periods such as Christmas or summer holidays. The driver for these is IT's ability to resource Change during these periods. In this situation it makes sense to call a Change Freeze in order to minimise risks.
Joined: Jan 16, 2005 Posts: 37 Location: New Zealand
Posted: Fri Aug 19, 2005 10:57 am Post subject:
Anonymous wrote:
A Change Freeze is called for one reason: to protect the IT infrastructure, application and/or other business activities from any Change activity that may undermine its stability and operation.
The most common times I've seen Change Freezes in action are when a major Change has just been implemented and time is required to monitor the impact of the Change on the infratsructure or affected application. the Change Freeze may be infrastructure-wide (nationally or global) or specific to an application.
The other times I've seen Change Freezes called is over holiday periods such as Christmas or summer holidays. The driver for these is IT's ability to resource Change during these periods. In this situation it makes sense to call a Change Freeze in order to minimise risks.
Sorry... just wanted to add something else to my earlier post in quotes. As with everything around Change Management, it is vitally important that the organisation or affected business unit (if it is a specific Change Freeze) has the reasons for Change Freeze clearly explained to them. It is invariably better to get their buy-in before one is called though most times, everyone will understand why it's been enacted.
Joined: Jan 16, 2005 Posts: 37 Location: New Zealand
Posted: Mon Aug 29, 2005 12:51 pm Post subject:
A 'Change Freeze' is a term that denotes no Change activity is to take place whatsoever - all Change activity stops! A Change Freeze can be applied to an entire infrastructure or specific systems or applications.
Joined: Feb 28, 2006 Posts: 411 Location: Coventry, England
Posted: Thu May 18, 2006 5:50 pm Post subject:
As a Change Manager I can confirm that most Change Freezes are actually moratoriums, in as much as they reduce to almost nil the number of Changes being processed. (All planned/project changes stop)
Most of us will know that there are always things that 'break' during a freeze and that you cannot in all conscience allow the system to run without fixing this problem.
The end result is that you have to allow 'fixes' to be processed and put into place, but because this is a very limited situation, overall control is much tighter.
This in turn ensures that the system is very stable during a period of extreme sensitivity.
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