Browse documentation
The change lifecycle
A change moves through a defined set of states. The state tells you what's true right now and what can happen next.
| State | Means |
|---|---|
| Draft | Being written. Incomplete is fine at this stage. |
| Assess | Under assessment — working out risk, impact, and what it touches. |
| Pending approval | Sent for a decision, waiting on approvers. |
| Approved | Agreed, but not yet booked into a window. |
| Scheduled | Approved with a window booked. |
| Implementing | The work is under way. |
| Review | Work finished, being reviewed before closing. |
| Closed | Done and reviewed. |
| Rejected | An approver turned it down. |
| Cancelled | Withdrawn before completion. |
Move a change along with the transition controls on its detail page. The states that stop a change dead are Rejected and Cancelled — everything else continues.
What gates each step
- Approval can't start without an assignee. This is the one hard requirement.
- High-risk changes need a rollback plan before approval starts. "High risk" means rated High or Critical, or flagged as causing an outage.
- Some types skip approval entirely. A change type can be configured to bypass the approval step, for standard low-risk work that shouldn't need a board every time.
Approval is a board vote, not one person
When a change reaches approval it routes to every change advisory board whose asset groups it touches — and all of those boards must approve. Within each board, its own rule decides how many members are needed: any one, a quorum, or all.
This matters because there is no single "the approver". Any member of a routed board can cast a decision, and one rejection moves the whole change to Rejected.
See Approvals for how decisions are cast and Change advisory boards and change types for how routing is configured.
After the work
Review exists so a change isn't closed the moment the work stops. Use it to record what actually happened — particularly if the outcome differed from the plan, since similar past changes surfaces that history on future changes.
Notes & tips
- A change sitting in Pending approval with nobody acting is usually a board with no members, not a broken workflow.
- Cancelled and Rejected are different records: cancelled is your decision, rejected is someone else's. Keep both rather than deleting.