ITS change management | IT Strategies and Policies | Seneca Students

Change management is a business process responsible for controlling the lifecycle of all changes from start to finish. This process is used to manage changes effectively in the environment in a predictable manner to reduce the negative impact to the business and to communicate changes. The primary objective of Change Management is to enable beneficial changes to be made, with minimum disruption to services.

Change windows

Change Windows are designated times where ITS may implement planned changes that could cause degradation or an outage of a service for a period of time.

•  These types of changes will only be performed in the designated change windows.
• This includes enterprise level and/or critical infrastructure services.
• Planned changes will not be implemented on any Friday’s or Thursday’s, where Friday is a holiday, because of the risk of issues or outages occurring as a result of implementing a change.

The following types of changes are exceptions to the change windows.

• When the business agrees that a service disruption during business hours is acceptable.
•  Emergency changes to fix service degradation or an outage of a service.
•  Proactive measure to prevent a foreseen major impact to a business critical service.
• Compromised Security of private or confidential information.
• Poses unacceptable financial loss or risks.
• Changes that will not cause a service disruption.

Weekly change windows

Monday 11: p.m. - Tuesday 7 a.m.

Tuesday 11: p.m.  - Wednesday 7 a.m.

Wednesday 11: p.m.  - Thursday 7 a.m.

Thursday 11: p.m.  - Friday 7 a.m.

Friday 11: p.m.  - Saturday 7 a.m.

Saturday 5:30 p.m. - Sunday 6: a.m.

Sunday 5:30 p.m. - Monday 6 a.m.

Enterprise Software includes MySeneca, Java Application Deployments, SharePoint,Office365, Peoplesoft Applications, etc.

Enterprise Infrastructure includes Active Directory, Storage Area Network (SAN), Databases, Identity Manager (IDM), Load Balancing Appliances, Virtual Machine (VM) Systems, Wired and Wireless Networks, Firewalls, PeopleSoft systems, Printing systems and Databases, etc.