EGI Change Management

The EGI Change Management (CHM) Process Introduction

This is the homepage on the EGI Wiki of the EGI Change Management Process. 

Ensuring effective change management within the EGI’s production IT environment is extremely important in ensuring high-quality delivery of IT services.

The purpose of the IT Change Management Policy is to manage changes in a planned and predictable manner in order to assess risks, assign resources, and minimize any potential negative impact to services. This is done by requiring change owners to prepare a Request for Change (File:Request+for+change+template.doc) where a set of standard questions regarding the change are answered and presented to the Change Advisory Board (CAB).

The CAB meets to assess and approve changes and is coordinated on the egi-cab@mailman.egi.eu mailing list. It consists of employees of the EGI Foundation including the Technical Director and members of the senior operations and management team. Currently the chair of the CAB is Matthew Viljoen. Other members include: Tiziana Ferrari, Vincenzo Spinoso, Alessandro Paolini, Diego Scardacci, Peter Solagna and Gergely Sipos. Others may be invited to join to provide additional expertise when discussing specific changes.

Changes are tracked as RT tickets on the change-mgmnt queue, while people can submit a completed RfC (File:Request+for+change+template.doc) to: change-mgmnt@rt.egi.eu. The change risk (likelihood X impact) should then be evaluated by the Service Owner and recorded as custom fields on the ticket in preparation for the CAB review. Further details about evaluating risk may be found here: File:IMS-RMGuideline-060117-1020-4791.pdf.

Click https://documents.egi.eu/public/ShowDocument?docid=2944 for a presentation introducing the process.

Services that fall under Change Control

Service Title	Person(s) Managing the Service
EGI DataHub	Lukasz Dutka, Barosz Kryza
EGI AppDB	Marios Chatziangelou
Operations Portal	Cyril L'Orphelin
Service Monitoring - ARGO	Kostas Koumantaros
Configuration Database - GOCDB	David Meredith
Helpdesk - GGUS	Guenter Grein, Helmut Dres
Accounting - Accounting repository (Computing and Grid)	Adrian Coveney
Accounting - Accounting Portal	Iván Díaz Álvarez
Messaging	Christos Kanellopoulos
Training Infrastructure	Gergely Sipos
CheckIn	Nicolas Liampotis

Standard Changes

This is the list of standard, or pre-approved changes, listed by Service.

Helpdesk - GGUS

Title	Description	RT Ticket Reference
Install patches on GGUS servers	The installation of patches is required on all GGUS servers for keeping the system secure.	RT#12262
Upgrade Onedata on the EGI DataHub	Standard upgrade of the Onezone.	RT#12262

Software Development changes

Most changes that fall under the scope of CHM will likely be to production service delivery (e.g. upgrades, major hardware changes etc). However, changes may also be in the form of software development to production services. For example, if a user community requests new functionality from developers that requires 2 months of development effort, there may be a risk of insufficient funded effort, or reduced manpower elsewhere in the project. This can especially be the case if such development is unforeseen at the beginning of a project. In such cases, persons managing services are encouraged to bring such changes to the CAB for discussion, approval and (where appropriate) appropriation of development effort.

Full Procedure Documentation

CHM procedure documentation is available on the EGI Confluence. These pages are only accessible to EGI Employees, so PDF versions of these pages are additionally available here:
File:IMS-Changemanagementpolicy-060117-1500-4793.pdf
File:IMS-CHM1Managechangesincludingemergencychanges-060117-1500-4795.pdf
File:IMS-CHM2Maintainthelist,descriptionsandstep-by-stepworkflowsforwell-knownandrecurringchanges-060117-1500-4797.pdf