1.0 Purpose

The purpose of this policy is to establish management direction and high-level objectives for the change management process. This policy guides the implementation of changes to reduce the impact on other tasks/projects and to mitigate associated risks such as information corruption/destruction, adverse impact on organizational processes, computer performance disruption, and productivity losses.

2.0 Scope

This policy applies to all IT systems and applications managed by Roboto Studio that store, process, or transmit information, including network and computer hardware, software and applications, mobile devices, and telecommunication systems.

3.0 Policy

3.1 Change Initiation and Impact Analysis

All changes, both scheduled and unscheduled, shall be documented, classified, and tracked. The documentation must identify the scope of the change, areas affected, back-out process, test plan, communication plan, and the planned deployment date. Business and technical risks and costs must be formally considered part of the impact assessment and documented in the change record before approval.

3.2 Change Approval and Implementation

Changes shall be approved formally prior to commencing the change or development and prior to implementing the fully-tested change into the production environment.

3.3 Post-Implementation Review

For medium and high-impact changes, a post-implementation review shall be performed to evaluate whether the desired result has been achieved. If a change does not perform as expected or causes issues, the attendees of the change meeting will determine if the change should be removed and the production environment returned to its prior stable state.

3.4 Denials

The Business Owner may deny a scheduled or unscheduled change for reasons including, but not limited to, inadequate change planning or unit testing, lack of stakeholder acceptance, system integration or interoperability concerns, missing or deficient roll-back plans, security implications and risks, and timing of the change negatively impacting key business processes.

3.5 Emergency Changes

Changes that cannot follow the normal process due to their urgency (such as service outages) shall be considered emergency changes and require immediate attention and quick implementation to avoid disruption.

3.6 Standard Changes and Patching

Standard changes (also called “routine changes”) tend to be pre-authorized changes that are considered to have little to no risk associated with them. These changes, such as applying security patches, are already pre-approved by management. All systems shall be patched and updated on a documented, regular, and timely schedule. Security-relevant patches, service packs, hotfixes, and anti-virus signatures should be reported to designated personnel. During security assessments, continuous monitoring, incident response activities, and system error handling, flaws discovered should be addressed.