The IT Change, Configuration & Release Manager will be responsible for establishing, governing and continually improving the organization’s Change Enablement, Service Configuration Management and Release Management practices. The role ensures that production changes and releases are appropriately assessed, authorized, planned, tested, communicated, implemented and reviewed, while maintaining reliable configuration information for critical technology services and their dependencies.
Operating in a dynamic technology services organization, the role will balance control, speed and operational agility. The Manager will work across Service Delivery, Engineering, DevOps, Infrastructure, Application Support, Information Security, Product, Project Management, Service Desk, customers and technology partners to protect service stability and enable successful delivery. The role also gives leadership and clients clear evidence of control through reporting, audit readiness and continual improvement.
Change Enablement:
- Own and continuously improve the Change Enablement policy, process, workflows, change models and governance standards in line with ITIL principles.
- Ensure Standard, Normal and Emergency Changes are appropriately classified, risk-assessed, authorized, scheduled, communicated and documented.
- Establish and coordinate Change Advisory Board (CAB) and Emergency CAB activities, including agendas, decision records, escalation routes and action tracking.
- Maintain the Change Schedule and identify conflicts, dependencies, blackout periods and potential customer or service impact.
- Publish and maintain the Forward Schedule of Change, change freeze periods and client-specific maintenance windows.
- Ensure that changes include business justification, affected services and configuration items, implementation and test evidence, security considerations, communication requirements and a viable back-out plan.
- Embed change controls into CI/CD pipelines (automated approvals, policy-as-code, linked tickets) so compliance is a by-product of how engineers already work.
- Identify and escalate unauthorized or inadequately controlled production changes.
- Coordinate Post-Implementation Reviews for failed, high-risk, emergency or materially impactful changes and ensure lessons feed into Problem Management and continual improvement.
- Engage Client Service teams and/or Clients’ IT teams on maintenance windows, joint CABs, change notifications and service reviews.
- Ensure changes initiated by cloud providers, SaaS vendors and technical partners are visible and assessed.
Service Configuration Management:
- Own the Service Configuration Management policy, standards, controls and improvement roadmap.
- Define Configuration Item (CI) scope, classification, mandatory attributes, naming conventions, ownership and relationship requirements.
- Lead the implementation, governance and continual improvement of the CMDB within the ITSM tool or equivalent configuration repository.
- Ensure configuration information supports Incident, Problem, Change, Release, Security and Service Delivery activities.
- Establish controls for creating, updating, verifying and retiring CIs following authorized changes and releases.
- Conduct periodic configuration verification and reconciliation to identify missing, duplicated, outdated or inaccurate records and relationships.
Release Management:
- Own the Release Management policy, release models, governance controls and readiness criteria.
- Maintain an integrated release calendar and coordinate dependencies across applications, platforms, infrastructure and customer environments.
- Facilitate release-readiness and go/no-go reviews for significant production releases.
- Work with DevOps to control the promotion path (development, test, staging, production) so that only approved, versioned builds reach production.
- Ensure releases have approved change records, completed testing, acceptance evidence, security clearance, deployment and rollback plans, monitoring, operational documentation, support readiness and stakeholder communications.
- Coordinate transition into business-as-usual support, including Early Life Support or Hypercare for major releases where required.
- Review release performance, failures, rollbacks and release-related incidents to drive corrective and preventive actions.
Governance, Reporting & Continuous Improvement:
- Develop and maintain the Change Authority Matrix, CAB Charter, Emergency Change procedure, Change Schedule, Release Calendar, Release Readiness Checklist, Configuration Management Plan and supporting work instructions.
- Produce weekly and monthly performance reports and dashboards covering change volume, change success rate, emergency changes, failed or rolled-back changes, release stability and CMDB data quality.
- Integrate the three practices with Incident, Problem, Service Level, Information Security, Project Management and Continual Improvement.
- Promote proportionate, risk-based controls that improve service stability without creating unnecessary bureaucracy.
- Support internal and external audits and drive timely closure of agreed findings and improvement actions.
- Maintain an improvement register for the three practices and apply the ITIL 4 continual improvement model, measuring before and after each change.