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OPERATIONS / DEVOPS / SRE TEMPLATE

Change Management Record Template

Change request with scope, risk assessment, step-by-step implementation, rollback plan, and approvals.

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What's inside

Field

Details

Change ID

CHG-XXXX

Status

Pending Approval

Type

Standard

Requested By

Name

Scheduled Date

Change Window

HH:MM — HH:MM UTC

What & Why

What are you changing and why? One paragraph, plain language. If you can't explain it simply, the change isn't well enough understood to make safely.

Scope & Impact

Dimension

Details

Systems affected

List every system, service, or database that will be touched

User impact

Will users notice? Downtime, degraded performance, feature unavailable?

Teams to notify

Who needs to know before, during, and after

Dependencies

Other changes or systems this depends on

Risk Assessment

Risk

Likelihood

Impact

Mitigation

Change causes outage

Low

High

Tested in staging, rollback plan ready

Change causes data inconsistency

Low

High

Backup taken before change, validation query after

Change takes longer than window

Medium

Medium

Abort criteria defined, rollback if not done by HH:MM

Implementation Steps

Numbered steps that anyone on the team could follow. Include commands, not just descriptions.

  • Pre-change: take backup / snapshot / note current state

  • Step 1: describe the action with exact command or procedure

  • Step 2: describe the next action

  • Step 3: describe the next action

  • Verify: confirm the change worked (health check, smoke test, metrics)

  • Post-change: update monitoring, notify stakeholders, close the ticket

Rollback Plan

How to undo this change if things go wrong. This must be tested before the change window.

  • Rollback step 1: exact command or procedure to revert

  • Rollback step 2: verify system is back to pre-change state

  • Rollback step 3: notify stakeholders that rollback occurred

Approvals

Role

Name

Decision

Date

Change owner

Proposed

Technical reviewer

Pending

Change manager / lead

Pending

Post-Change Review

Fill in after the change is complete.

Question

Answer

Did the change go as planned?

Yes / No — if no, what happened?

Was the rollback plan needed?

Yes / No

Any follow-up actions?

Tickets, monitoring changes, documentation updates

Lessons for next time?

What would you do differently?

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