These Change Management teams are commonly handling thousands of change requests each year, many of which will be Service affecting and Service impacting; from software updates, patches and releases, to configuration changes, and upgrades or replacement of physical hardware these must be managed within an operators business critical processes.

Mistakes, oversight, miscalculations, poor planning and unexpected errors can cause service outage, impairment or frustration for 100s if not 1000s of customers. For most CSPs this has a financial impact; not only do they end up compensating customers, but they lose the faith their customers had in them and they risk the cessation of their service contract.

Requests submitted to Change Management teams must be assessed to determine impact on services to customers. Manually this is a time-consuming task, fraught with risk and complexity and often un-orchestrated behaviour. Risks increase as, in addition to the volume of activities, there is always a volume of intrinsic knowledge and undocumented variations to contend with, alongside all of the documented, well understood business process rules.

Change Management Teams receive high volumes of requests, some of which are highly complex. A Change Management team at capacity through either volumetric pressure, complexity or both are more prone to mistakes. Whether this results in contractual, customer facing issues and obligations not being achieved, or worse still, a failure to meet statutory obligations an operators reputation is always on the line.