Standard Change

This is the concept that lets continuous delivery and an ITIL change process coexist, and it is already in the framework — which matters, because the argument in most enterprises is not won by telling a governance function that its process is obsolete.

The mechanism: the class of change is assessed and approved once, along with the automation and controls that make it safe. Individual instances then execute without further approval, recording themselves against the standing authorisation. A deployment through a pipeline with automated tests, policy checks, canary analysis and automatic rollback is precisely the low-risk repeatable change the category was written for.

The evidence work is the real effort, and it is architecture work: demonstrate the controls exist in the pipeline, that they cannot be bypassed, that they produce durable audit records, and that rollback is automatic. That package is what an auditor accepts in place of a signature.

The prize is large. Removing a change advisory board from the path of routine deployment typically takes days out of lead time, and the research does not support the board having bought reliability in exchange.