Change Freeze - How, When and Why it needs to be implemented

[bundera.]

Hi

I am a Change Coordiantor and want to know more about Change Freezes. I would like to know how, when and why a change freeze needs to be implemented?

If there is any documentation it would be great to find out where.

thanks

Bundera

[blackbeard]

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.

[Guest]

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.

[blamblam]

[Guest]

What is a change Freeze???

[blamblam]

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.

[Skinnera]

Though I've never worked anywhere where all Change activity comes to a stop - it's usually been all planned work, so excluding Fault related work.

We've also taken to callingthem Businness Protection Periods, as that better communicates what their purpose is and sounds less Draconian...

[Ed]

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.

Regards

Ed

[Skinnera]

Though of course there is a view that says if organisations were good at making changes, there'd be a reduced need for a Freeze...

[Ed]

True, but as soon as you introduce those sticky-out bits on the end of arms into the mix, anything can happen, hence the need for a freeze.

Regards

Ed