How to run a CAB Meeting

Why is a CAB Meeting important?

As the name suggests, a change request is a request to modify an aspect of your production environment; which does not only impact your team, but other teams and customers as well.

How to have an effective CAB meeting?

To achieve a good CAB Meeting, members have to be agreed upon:

👥 CAB Members

Who are the CAB members?

Your CAB meeting should include at least one member out of every group impacted by the changes on the agenda; both from tech and non-tech teams. It's also useful to include support/Service Desk teams.

What do the CAB members do?

CAB members should review the changes before the meeting, so that during the CAB meeting, they can discuss, assess and recommend (approve or not) the change request. If a CAB member cannot attend a scheduled meeting, they should send a representative.

👤 CAB Owner

Who is the CAB owner?

The CAB owner is usually a change manager or a member of the change management team.

What does the CAB owner do?

The CAB owner conducts the CAB meeting  and acts as a guardian. They develop the strategy for the meeting, making sure all required members (from teams that are affected by change) are present. They also define and communicate the CAB members' roles and responsibilities, and document the meeting.

🔴 Before the meeting

It's important to have a well structured process, for the meeting to happen seamlessly.

Meeting schedules

The CAB meeting usually happens once a week (or more); it depends on the volume of changes  in place or on business needs.

Required attendees

Every team who might be impacted by the changes on the agenda should have a representative in the meeting.

Meeting agenda

The meeting agenda should at least include the following topics:

• High risk changes and the ones marked as required
• Review failed and rolled-back changes from previous meetings
• Any possible update in the change management process

🛠 The tools you can use for a CAB meeting

Jira Service Management

Jira Service Management already offers a default workflow for your Change Management Process.

As well as a Request Form featuring the most common fields needed.

If you’re starting with this process, you don’t necessarily need to start from scratch.

Once you’ve defined a deadline for the changes to be discussed in your next CAB meeting (i.e. all the “authorized” changes created until a day before the CAB meeting), you can then create a filter in Jira and subscribe your attendees to it.

Swanly for CAB meetings in Jira

You can use Swanly to coordinate the meeting alongside a clear roadmap view for all stakeholders to access. What you can do is create a release to represent each CAB Meeting, and assign the corresponding changes to each of your releases.

Click on "Add Release", then "Create Release":

Give a name to your release and select the projects it connects to:

Once you’ve created your release, you can schedule it by clicking on "Schedule" or simply drag & drop it into the roadmap:

Then, we can both, create changes and assign it to the releases, or assign already created changes:

🟡 During the meeting

Review changes in the agenda:

• Business impact and possible risks
• Implementation and roll-back plans
• Possible impacts on related services and/or applications that may be running on the same infrastructure
• Impact and risk of NOT implementing the change
• Resource assessment for all teams involved in the implementation (infrastructure, database, network and so on)
• Other changes being implemented within the same schedules, or around them

🟢 After the meeting

Communicate the outcome of your meeting and the changes approved (or not) with everyone involved in the change management process.

Later on, you can also see how the change requests from previous CAB meetings were implemented (or not).