What is the Change Advisory Board (CAB)?

A Change Advisory Board (CAB) is a group of individuals responsible for reviewing and approving significant changes within an IT environment. It exists to support the Change Management process by assessing proposed changes for their impact, risk, and alignment with business priorities before implementation.

CABs are a core part of ITIL’s Change Management practice. While not mandatory in every organization, they help introduce structure and consistency when handling complex or high-risk changes. The CAB typically includes representatives from IT, security, operations, service desk, business units, and sometimes vendors or third parties — anyone who might be affected by or has expertise relevant to the change.

What is the role of the change advisory board?

The Change Advisory Board’s main role is to provide guidance, oversight, and recommendations for changes that carry a higher level of risk or complexity. It acts as a decision-support group, helping the change manager evaluate whether a change should move forward, be delayed, or need further revision.

The CAB’s goals are to:

• Make sure changes are thoroughly assessed before implementation.
• Reduce the risk of outages, service disruptions, or conflicts between changes.
• Align proposed changes with business needs and operational readiness.
• Improve the overall success rate of changes by identifying weak spots early.

The board doesn’t review every change. Low-risk or pre-approved changes typically follow a standard process and don’t require CAB involvement. The board steps in for major changes, high-impact requests, or emergency changes where cross-functional input is valuable.

A CAB doesn’t carry out the changes itself. Instead, it helps ensure that decisions are informed, change risks are understood, and timelines are realistic. Also, depending on the organization's governance model, final approval may still rest with a Change Manager or senior leadership.

Why do you need the CAB?

Only 25% of employees think their senior leaders are good at managing change, according to WTW. That tells us many decisions happen without enough input from the people who understand the technical risks or user impact.

When changes are made in isolation, they’re more likely to cause problems, especially in IT, where even small updates can affect multiple systems. Poor communication, missed dependencies, or rushed timelines often lead to outages or rework.

The CAB helps fix that. Instead of change decisions coming from one place, it gathers the right people to evaluate changes from multiple angles. It makes change less vertical and more collaborative, reducing blind spots and unplanned disruptions.

Organizations benefit from a CAB when:

• Multiple systems or services are involved: A change to one application could affect several others. CAB members can identify these dependencies.
• There’s a high risk to uptime or security: Changes to infrastructure, authentication, or user access are reviewed more carefully.
• Customer-facing services are impacted: If there’s potential for user disruption, the CAB can weigh whether timing or communication plans are adequate.
• The change has business implications: CAB input helps balance technical needs with operational or regulatory concerns.

Criticism towards the change advisory board

The Change Advisory Board (CAB) has drawn a fair share of criticism over the years — some of it earned, some of it rooted in misinterpretation.

• The name 'Change Advisory Board' has been weighed down by overuse and bureaucracy. Many organizations associate CABs with delays and unnecessary formality. Instead of supporting change, the term often signals a slow approval process with too many steps.
   
• CABs were meant to be one level of authority, not the only one. They were never intended to be the sole gatekeepers. When teams treat the CAB as the final and only decision-maker, they risk turning Change Management into a bottleneck.
   
• The CAB’s role was to assess risk and impact, not to review every technical detail.
  CABs were created to look at how changes might affect the broader environment. But in practice, many CAB meetings end up micromanaging technical aspects that should’ve been handled earlier.
   
• CABs were treated as mandatory because ITIL didn’t provide enough flexibility. ITIL introduced the CAB as a standard practice, but didn't clearly explain how to scale or adapt it. Many organizations saw it as a required step for every change, even when it didn’t make sense.

As Kevin Holland, ITSM and SIAM consultant, put it:

“ITIL v2 started the CAB obsession, saying that ‘decision irrelevant’ people like the capacity manager and the problem manager needed to attend the CAB. And that the decision was the Change Manager's. It seemed good at the time, but in hindsight it wasn’t and has probably done more to harm ITIL than any other construct.”

• CABs aren’t necessary for every change, and that’s okay. Some organizations still find value in regular CAB meetings. Others work better with risk-based approval paths, smaller review groups, or even asynchronous reviews. The conclusion is the same: a CAB should be shaped by your actual needs, not just inherited from a framework.

Change advisory board roles and members

The Change Advisory Board is made up of people who can speak to the technical, business, and operational impact of a proposed change. It’s very important to note that membership isn’t fixed — it's flexible depending on the type of change under review. The goal is to include the right mix of expertise.

A typical CAB includes:

• Change manager: Leads the meeting, presents the change, and facilitates the review process. Often, the one responsible for final decisions or escalation.
• IT operations: Offers insight into infrastructure impact and operational stability.
• Service desk lead: Brings up potential user-facing issues or support requirements.
• Security representative: Reviews any risks related to compliance or vulnerabilities.
• Application owners or developers: Speak to software dependencies, performance, or testing.
• Business unit representatives: Members from different business units provide insights on how changes affect their operations, helping ensure that all perspectives are considered.
• Vendors or third parties: Included when external systems, tools, or services are involved.

CAB members should have enough authority and context to evaluate risks and approve or challenge proposed plans.

Change advisory board process

The CAB process follows a consistent structure to keep reviews focused and actionable. Here’s how it typically flows:

1. Change submission
   A change request is formally submitted, often by a project team or service owner. The request includes scope, technical details, risk assessment, proposed timeline, and rollback plan.
    
2. Initial review by Change Manager
   The Change Manager reviews the request for completeness and determines if it needs CAB involvement based on risk, impact, or complexity.
    
3. CAB meeting scheduled
   Relevant CAB members are invited. Meetings can be recurring (e.g., weekly) or scheduled as needed. Emergency CABs (eCAB) may be formed for urgent changes.
    
4. Change presentation and discussion
   The requestor or Change Manager presents the change. Members discuss risks, dependencies, scheduling, resource availability, and potential impact.
    
5. Decision
   The board may approve, reject, or request modifications to the change. If more information is needed, the change can be deferred to a future meeting.
    
6. Documentation and follow-up
   Decisions are documented in the change record. Approved changes move to planning and implementation, while rejected or modified changes go back for revision.

Emergency change advisory board

Some changes can’t wait for the next CAB meeting — especially when there’s an outage, a security breach, or a major incident that needs an urgent fix. That’s where the Emergency Change Advisory Board (eCAB) comes in.

The eCAB handles high-priority changes that need fast approval but still require oversight. It’s smaller than the regular CAB and typically includes only the Change Manager, key technical leads, and anyone directly affected by the change. The goal is to assess risk quickly, make a decision, and keep track of what happened for later review.

After the emergency is resolved, the change is documented and reviewed in the next regular CAB meeting to improve future response plans.

How InvGate can support the CAB process

InvGate Service Management enables you to structure and manage change requests from start to finish. Within the tool, you can define custom Change Management workflows, automate approval steps, and route each request to the right CAB members based on its risk and scope.

It also supports follow-up after approval. You can build custom dashboards to monitor implementation progress, track outcomes, and spot delays or patterns in failed changes.

For risk assessment, InvGate’s AI-driven Predictive Risk and Impact Analysis suggests risk and impact levels based on similar past requests. This gives CAB members more context during reviews and helps standardize how risks are evaluated across teams.

Everything stays documented and visible, so changes move forward with fewer surprises.

Change advisory board best practices

A well-run CAB improves how change is managed across IT. These practices help it work better:

• Match the CAB to the change: Invite people based on the type of change, not a fixed list. Too many irrelevant attendees slow things down.
• Keep meetings focused: Limit agenda items to changes that actually need review. Routine or low-risk requests can follow a separate process.
• Use data to support decisions: Make sure change records include technical details, risk assessments, and rollback plans.
• Document everything: Record who attended, what was discussed, and what was approved or rejected.
• Review outcomes regularly: Look back at failed or successful changes to improve the review process over time.