A great explanation by SysAid on Change Management.
Joe is excited to upgrade one of his company’s servers. After speaking with the CIO and getting clearance to perform the upgrade overnight, Joe grabs a pizza and straps in for an overnight hardware replacement. A couple hours later, the business is thrown into chaos as Joe’s company’s international client base is unable to get quotes through their quote generation service. An angry call from the CIO lets Joe know just how badly he’s screwed up this time. Unfortunately, Joe didn’t check his infrastructure dependencies before performing his upgrade. If he had, he would have immediately recognized that bringing down the server would also take the quote generation service offline.
If Joe would have had an active CMDB to cross-check his upgrade with. The change management would have helped ensure that Joe took every step necessary to prevent any unwanted outages. After putting in a change management request, Joe would have seen the issue before it started, and been able to contact the relevant managers to better coordinate the downtime. Through this process, Joe could have picked a better day to perform his hardware upgrade.
Don’t be like Joe and risk your company’s time, money, and resources on poorly planned changes. The introduction of a detailed CMDB and change management process can be the difference between a smooth upgrade and an global disaster.