One business area that you must continuously remain vigilant in is the ITIL service policy and vendor infrastructure management process. Working with vendors can be complex, especially when changes are unknowingly or haphazardly released to your company’s systems. These unexpected system changes can negatively affect the stability of your entire service management structure.
To control the flow of changes to your system – in addition to the requirement of establishing strong client contracts including measurable, clearly defined KPIs – it is highly recommended that you establish a Change Advisory Board.
Change Advisory Board defined
A change advisory board is a committee group of stakeholders, usually engineers, managers, operations, and vendor representatives, that review all software, application, or cloud infrastructure change requests that are interacting with your company system, in a documented and structured way and usually on a set schedule, unless an emergency change advisory board (eCAB) meeting becomes necessary.
A CAB is more than just oversight of changes and it provides several benefits to both vendors and the company establishing the CAB. A CAB process provides a forum for collaborative innovation, enhances management awareness of service management problems, and provides a consistent request process that carefully analyzes each system change.
Complicated service management systems
For large-scale parking lot system managers – such as the LAWA airport parking complex in Los Angeles that is professionally managed by ABM – managing vendor relationships and the interlocking service infrastructure can be very complicated, especially when a change in software infrastructure is needed, that may interact with several interlocking parts to the system.
At LAWA airport’s parking complex, ABM provides services to customers including technology-enhanced find your car, seamless pay through an app beforehand (or upon exit), security upgrades to parking areas, valet parking, e-vehicle charging, and both long and short-term parking areas to LAX airport customers with competitive rates. In addition to the customer-facing functions, several behind-the-scenes systems exist to support and integrate these functions into one fully contiguous system.
When a system change goes wrong – it can be detrimental to a business such as ABM’s LAWA parking complex. Any system downtime directly affects customers and their experience in a negative way and may even impact the company’s bottom line [profits].
An answer to complicated service management
Implementing a Change Advisory Board is one strategic key to enhancing an infrastructure change process. The CAB process provides a step-by-step predictable process that guides vendors from start to end, beginning with the submission of a change request, through the advisory review process, and ending with the implementation impact review.
A well-defined and prominently published CAB process makes it easy for all stakeholders to follow the review process and adhere to their CAB roles. An established CAB process also provides a regular, transparent forum to document advisory decisions and recommendations that can ultimately be utilized for service management system improvement.
Continuous improvement practices are involved in the review and closure phase of the CAB change process – through RCA and reporting upon incidents; and regular review of CAB activities and approvals, in one concise report, to the c-suite managers. This continuous improvement process serves as an opportunity to both mitigate possible risks and provides a forum for innovation.
The CAB structure and stakeholder roles
Stakeholders to review the requests for change and a Change Manager to oversee the entire process are necessary roles to ensure the CAB process occurs. These stakeholders could be development/integration/automation engineers, on-the-ground operations managers, business managers, documentation specialists, vendor representatives, or anyone with specialized knowledge of the requests being reviewed.
CABs tend to meet at least monthly and follow a standard agenda that includes both old and new requests for change. Advisory decisions are documented by the Change Manager and the reports produced are reviewed by all stakeholders including company management.
Vendors also play an essential role in the CAB process, as they prepare and submit their requests for change, and provide the background information necessary for the CAB reviews to occur. Requests that are easy to understand and well-prepared are usually easier for the CAB to understand without additional questions (and therefore, additional time needed for approval).
A new CAB implementation
In light of these best practices surrounding CABs, EIT Consulting has established ABM’s first Change Advisory Board to improve the management of the LAWA infrastructure’s requested service changes by the many vendors they partner with at the Los Angeles airport parking complex.
As a brand new CAB implementation, EIT has started from the ground floor to build a customized process for the effective management of vendor changes for this large system. This customized process includes templates for the CAB meeting agendas, a well-vetted online request for change form, and a monthly reporting structure that will empower ABM management to make more accurate service management decisions.
Below are examples of the monthly reports that will be generated for the documentation of the KPIs:
Table 1: Change metrics per month
Table 2: Change metrics per vendor
Change Summary- Dashboard
KPI Considerations by Type and Category
Essential to the CAB process and effective SLA contract management is the defining of clear, measurable key performance indicators (KPIs).
Recommended KPIs for an implementation similar to the above case study example might include:
- Number of changes addressed by CAB
- Number of CAB meetings
- Time for change approval/rejection
- Change acceptance rate
- Number of emergency changes
- Percentage of emergency changes
- Percentage of failed changes
- Average time to close a change
- Number of incidents created by vendor
- Financial ramifications per vendor
Failed implementations are not always the fault of the vendor – but a managed change process surrounding any infrastructure change will ensure greater accountability and fewer overall failed or downtime-incident-causing changes. Simply the process of reviewing the change requests by multiple stakeholders creates a platform for further improvement, an alignment of goals between teams, an increase of regulatory and contract compliance, and fosters an opportunity to enhance the ultimate bottom line: customer experience.