Why You Are Being Asked To Be in CAB

Today’s blog is from the mailbag of notables.  The context of this email is when I was “leading by walking around” and overhearing a few employes not wanting to go to CAB.  Not wanting is putting it nicely.  CAB is “Change Approval Board”, which is mostly a call to talk about the changes happening to the production environment.

From: Jonathan Merrill
Sent: From My Desk
Subject: Why You Are Being Asked To Be in CAB
Importance: High

Just overheard “Why do I need to be at CAB. I don’t have changes”. Not the first time this has been said. And it’s not unnoticed those team members who don’t show up. Before you say, “busy”, I know everyone is busy. We are all busy. Nevertheless, here is why I encourage you to be at CAB every time:

1. If you do have a change, you need to explain to CAB what the change is, what it will impact, and allow architects and SMEs to chime in. We’ve had one over-ride since we started CAB, which saved us from an embarrassing situation.

2. You listen in on what’s changing in our environment. Operations teams must have the pulse on what’s going on. If you don’t know, how can you react? Putting things together is a skill, just like listening and comprehending. All three should be applied in CAB.

3. Opportunities to sharpen your saw putting in changes. Once we get some consistent muscle memory on non-standard changes, let’s talk about standard changes. Until then, let’s learn from each other and ensure we understand the why about change management. I’ll need your help to train other teams once they get incorporated into our change system.

If you’re working on a critical ticket, production outage in flight, or anything affecting a client ability to process, then your at least armed with what changed.

If your actively engaged in a production issue, clear it with your manager and let him or another team member represent your change in CAB.

Any other reason… eh, no. Knowledge culture, folks. Root word is “Know”. We need you to know. I need you to know. This is the culture we are building. Please participate. Everyone…

\\ JMM