Change Types

A Normal change is one that meets the defined lead time for testing and validation. It can have single or multiple teams involved and can vary in risk level.
These changes need Technical, Business, and CAB approval.

NOTE: See lead times
NOTE: All Changes affecting Stanford Health Care (SHC) and/or Stanford Children’s Health (SCH) require authorization from their respective CABs.  Lead times provide enough advance notices for UIT to present the requested Changes to those CABs. 
 

An Expedited change does not meet the lead time requirement for a Normal change but is not an Emergency Change. It follows same process and approval flow as a ‘Normal’ Change, but lead times are much shorter and they require a reason for being expedited.
These changes need Technical, Business, and CAB approval. It's the responsibility of the Change Owner (Assigned to) to sheppard the change through the approval process.

NOTE: See lead times

Note: Expedited changes should always be communicated to the Stanford Healthcare Account team (healthcare-account-team@lists.stanford.edu) so they can advise the respective Hospital leadership.

Emergency changes are used to restore service or fix a P1 Incident (“Service Alert”) immediately or situations where the impact to a service is imminent if action is not taken. These changes do not follow the complete lifecycle of a Normal change due to the speed with which they must be implemented and authorized.  Emergency changes are formally raise/recorded, reviewed, approved after the fact.

Examples:

• Service is down or will experience an outage unless a change is performed
• Service is up but severely degraded
• Fix critical security issue as identified by ISO
• Prevent data corruption

Note: Emergency changes should always be communicated to the Stanford Healthcare Account team (healthcare-account-team@lists.stanford.edu) so they can advise the respective Hospital leadership.

Standard changes are created from pre-approved templates based on the change being one that is repeatable with no deviation (low risk/impact) and has completed the Normal change flow at least 3-5 times with no issues.   Standard Changes are a  defined list of specific tasks that will be completed and in some cases may include a variables such as patch version(s), port  numbers, network range, server name(s).
These changes do not need approval since they have been pre-approved by the CAB after a request is made and a review completed.  See information on requesting a new template here.

An informational change is not being implemented by Stanford University IT and is used only to inform CAB members of times and possible impacts. These changes have no approval since Stanford can’t impact timing or scope.

Information Changes can also be used for times when communicating widely about a 1-Very High or 2-High Non-Production (development) Changes is very important. To do so, staff should contact the UIT Change Management team with that special request.