CHANGE MANAGEMENT

1. What is Change Management?

Change Management (CM) is the process for managing changes in an organization—especially in IT environments—in a way that is controlled, predictable, approved, and audit-ready.

The goal is to ensure that a change:

Drives improvements—without harming business operations, stability, or compliance posture.

CM processes focus on:

• Scope (what is changed and why)
• Impact (which systems and Configuration Items are affected)
• Risk (business and operational risk)
• Approval (who owns and authorizes the change)
• Schedule (when the change is implemented)
• Audit trail (evidence, documentation & traceability)

It is important to understand:

CM is about governance and collaboration first—not execution engines.
Deployment actions and artifact execution tracking are already handled better by existing CI/CD and DevOps pipeline tooling.

2. CM only works when integrated with the CMDB, relationships, and other processes

Modern Change maturity is driven by impact context, traceability, governance, and revision readiness—and this is where the CMDB becomes essential.

A change must communicate:

• Which CI’s in the CMDB are affected
• Which assets and service components are included
• Upstream/downstream dependencies to IT services

A typical example:

A change on an authentication service affects Keycloak SSO, API gateway, all tenants, UX login flows and connected PostgreSQL pods/services in the DB namespace.

This is managed through CI relationships and dependencies in the CMDB, not by executing files inside the Change tool—but by providing CI/CD with the correct Change context via API.

3. Affected Items via CMDB — the core of Change Impact & Audit Traceability

This impact focus is essential because:

The execution layer is already solved better by CI/CD pipelines—CM must provide the context, while audit must be able to trace affected CI’s and assets from CMDB dependencies.

4. Change Templates and standardized (“normed”) changes

Modern organizations need repeatable and standardized Change models, such as:

• Database Schema Change
• Firewall Rule Update
• Security Agent Rollout
• Server Resize
• DNS Change
• API Version Update

With templates, organizations gain:

✔ Consistent quality baseline
✔ Faster adoption of repeatable standard changes
✔ Fewer errors in language, impact, and scope framing

5. Task Management & Change Workflows

Change Management becomes strongest when it:

• Enables task breakdown planning
• Shows activities in calendar views
• Provides Gantt timeline visibility
• Supports comments, cross-team collaboration, and accountability

But the workflow layer is about:

Presenting, planning, and coordinating Change tasks—not executing them automatically.

6. System cooperation via API — modern adoption & orchestration

In modern IT ecosystems, CM delivers the most value when it can play together via API:

• The Change Owner approves a Change and gives green light to execution
• CI/CD pipelines orchestrate deployments in their own secure ecosystems while using CM as the business-context reference
• Impact context, heatmaps and dependencies are delivered by CMDB
• Audit-related status is synced or referenced back into the Change process
• Changes can reference the knowledge base for guidance and documentation evidence

The value comes from integration—not reinvention.

7. Audit & Revision Readiness

Auditors must be able to see:

• Who owned and approved the Change
• Which CI’s were affected
• Impact scope via CMDB dependencies
• When it was planned and scheduled
• Change history and documented references

CI-affected items and CMDB relationships are the key to audit traceability.

8. Practicle v4 — a complete change solution

Practicle does not include execution engines or artifact deployment logic, because:

These capabilities are already handled better, more securely, and more maturely in existing CI/CD pipeline and DevOps deployment tools today.

9. Why Practicle is genius

Practicle stands out by delivering:

• Strong governance adoption
• Collaboration-first change process
• CMDB-driven impact clarity
• Audit-ready traceability
• Workflow, calendar and Gantt visibility
• CI/CD synergy through API—without friction or overlap with execution engines

Governance strength and impact clarity—without reinventing the execution layers that already exist.