Change to be implemented

[rahul_acc]

Hi,

Need help to understand...
You have a change to implemented during off-business hours (infra or application) say from 3AM to 6AM (3 hours window). You are doing good for the change, suddenly your team member walks up to you at 5AM and says there is a problem with the change and it may need another 2hours to implement the change. Now the change window needs to extended for another 1 hours. Client is not available during the off business hours to approve another 1 hour time. How to go about it?
My thought - consider the impact of the change. If the impact is huge and there is major disruption to the service if the window goes beyond the approved timeline then we need to backout the change. But the issue here is that even the backout will take time and there are chances that we again overshoot the window. Alternatively, we take the approval from client to extend the window but the client is not available during the off business hours. I understand without prior approval we cannot extend the window. Need to help to understand how do we go about this.

[Fang]

This has happpened to us, and the working solution we are using now is:

We decide a change window when scheduling an approved change. Within that change window we specify the cut off for deciding to back out.

For example: Change shoud take 1 hour. Allow 2 hour change window, with back out go/no go after one hour.

This has resulted in no unexpected impacts on services after complex changes. Obviously, there a simple/fast changes (adding a virtual cluster) where its nonsense to do this!

We are quite open with the business that we are doing this, and no complaints so far................