Change Management Plan

Change is defined as anything—hardware, software, system components, services, documents, or processes—that is deliberately introduced into the production environment and which may affect a service level agreement (SLA) or otherwise affect the functioning of the environment or one of its components.

• Change objectives specifies what the change is intended to achieve—This should be a re-statement of the objectives approved in the change request;
  

• Resource plan specifies roles and responsibilities for the change team including:

• The expected level of effort required for each resource together with the cost and work schedule; and  
• Other required resources, such as configuration management tools, change testing tools and release package tools;

• Change approach specifies what change management work is required to complete the change;

• A change management communication plan specifies how communication will be managed and who is responsible for communications;

• Risk management plan defines the process that will be followed to identify and resolve project risks;

• Configuration management plan identifies configuration and change management retirements;
  

• Quality assurance plan specifies how the change manager plans to ensure quality of all change project deliverables;
  

• Test plan specifies how quality assurance testing will be managed, who will be responsible for creating test cases, what software test tools will be required, and how change acceptance will be determined;

• Documentation management plan should specify the change management document review process and baseline procedures together with any other documentation standards; and

• Release plan should specify the tasks and deliverables required to ensure a successful transition to production.