CHANGE MANAGEMENT

Nothing changes
without a board

Joka's Change Advisory Board ensures that every modification to any system, no matter how trivial, is reviewed by a committee of people who don't understand it.

How it works

1

Submit a Change Request Form

Complete all mandatory fields including business justification, rollback plan, blast radius assessment, stakeholder impact matrix, and a signed declaration that you understand the change may be rejected.

2

Wait for CAB review

The Change Advisory Board meets every other Thursday at 4pm. Your change request will be reviewed in the order it was received. Current queue: 847 items. Estimated wait: 14 months.

3

Receive feedback

The board will request clarification on fields you already filled in, ask you to resubmit with a different stakeholder sign-off, and suggest you also submit an Architecture Review Request (separate form, separate board, separate 14-month queue).

4

Approval (conditional)

If approved, your change may proceed during the next scheduled change window (third Saturday of each month, 2am-4am). Approval is valid for 30 days. After that, resubmit.

5

Post-implementation review

After deploying, submit a Post-Implementation Review documenting what happened, what didn't happen, and why it took 14 months to change a button colour. This review is itself a change request and must go through the CAB.

Change Request Form fields

All fields are mandatory.

  1. Change title
  2. Change description
  3. Change type (Standard / Normal / Emergency / Retroactive / Theoretical)
  4. Change category (Infrastructure / Application / Database / CSS / Other)
  5. Risk level (Low / Medium / High / Existential)
  6. Business justification
  7. Stakeholder name
  8. Stakeholder's manager name
  9. Stakeholder's manager's manager name
  10. Department
  11. Department budget code
  12. Affected systems
  13. Rollback plan
  14. Rollback plan for the rollback plan
  15. Blast radius assessment
  16. Impact on other teams (even if none, explain why none)
  17. Scheduled implementation window
  18. Estimated downtime
  19. Communication plan
  20. Testing evidence
  21. Peer review sign-off
  22. Architecture Review Board reference number (if applicable, and it's always applicable)
  23. Signed declaration acknowledging this change may be rejected

"We submitted a change request to update a README. It was rejected because we didn't include a rollback plan. For a README."

- Senior Developer, enterprise client (3 years into a 2-year contract)

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Joka's Change Management module is included in Enterprise+ Pro Max.

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