In the high-stakes world of modern IT operations, "speed" and "stability" are often treated as polar opposites. Developers want to push code as fast as possible to meet market demands, while Operations teams and business stakeholders want to ensure that the environment remains stable and predictable.
This tension is nowhere more evident than in the Change Approval Process.
For many organizations, the approval process is a single, chaotic "gate." A change request is submitted, and someone, usually a manager or a Change Advisory Board (CAB), is expected to give it the green light. But this "bundled" approach is not always the best path forward. It asks a single individual or group to validate two entirely different sets of criteria: Does this work? and Is now a good time?
By failing to separate Technical Approval (The Logic Check) from Operational Approval (The Schedule Check), businesses inadvertently create massive friction, leading to "rubber-stamping," deployment disasters, and burned-out teams.
In this deep dive, we’ll explore why this separation is the "secret sauce" of elite IT squads and how change management platforms like ChangeBreeze automate this discipline to eliminate spreadsheet chaos.
The Logic Check: What is Technical Approval?
Technical Approval is the foundational layer of change management. It is an internal validation within the engineering or technical team. The primary question here isn't about the business calendar; it's about the integrity of the solution.
The Core Objectives:
- Validation of Implementation Steps: Does the technical plan make sense? If an engineer says they are going to "update the database schema," the technical approver looks at the exact SQL scripts.
- Peer Review and Quality Control: This is essentially a "Code Review" for infrastructure and system changes. It ensures that the person doing the work hasn't missed a critical dependency or made a syntactical error.
- Backout Plan Integrity: If things go wrong, will the rollback plan actually work? A technical approver validates that the "Undo" button has been built and tested.
- Security and Compliance: Does this change adhere to our security protocols? Is it exposing a port it shouldn't?
Who Should Be the Technical Approver?
Technical approval should be granted by someone who speaks the language. This might be a Senior Engineer, a Technical Lead, or a System Architect. Crucially, it should not be the person who wrote the plan. The value comes from the second pair of eyes.
The Problem with Skipping It:
When technical approval is skipped or bundled with business approval, you risk deploying "perfectly timed" broken code. A business manager might approve a change for 2:00 AM on a Tuesday (a great time!), but they have no way of knowing that the implementation script has a typo that will blow up the production environment.
The Schedule Check: What is Operational Approval?
Operational Approval (also known as Business Approval) looks at the change from 30,000 feet. Once the engineers have Pinky-promised that "this thing works," the Operational Approver decides where it fits in the universe.
The Core Objectives:
- Collision Avoidance: Is another team doing maintenance on a dependent system at the exact same time?
- Business Continuity: Are we heading into a "Change Freeze" for a major marketing event? (e.g., Don't deploy a new payment gateway five minutes before Black Friday begins).
- Resource Availability: If this change goes south, do we have the right people on standby to fix it? Operational approval ensures the "Emergency Response" team isn't all on vacation.
- Stakeholder Communication: Have the impacted departments been notified?
Who Should Be the Operational Approver?
This is typically an Operations Manager, a Service Desk Manager, or a representative from the Change Advisory Board (CAB). They may not know how to write a Python script, but they know exactly when the CEO is giving a live demo and that nothing should change before then.
The Problem with Skipping It:
This is how "The Black Friday Outage" happens. You might have the most technically sound, perfectly tested update in history, but if you deploy it during a peak traffic window without operational oversight, any minor hiccup becomes a business catastrophe.
The Danger of the "Bundled" Approval
When you combine these two stages into a single "Approve" button, you create Business Friction. Here’s why:
- The Information Overload: Managers get buried in technical jargon they don't understand, so they start "rubber-stamping" requests just to clear their inbox.
- The Delayed Feedback Loop: If a manager rejects a change for "Operational" reasons (e.g., "The time is bad"), the engineer might waste hours trying to find a "Technical" bug that doesn't exist.
- The Single Point of Failure: If the only person who can approve a change is a manager who is in meetings all day, technical work grinds to a halt even if the logic is already sound and peer-reviewed.
Real-World Scenarios: A Tale of Two Outages
To understand the value of separation, let's look at two common failure modes in companies without structured change control.
Scenario A: The Flawless Code that Killed the Sales Team
An MSP has a brilliant engineer who writes a script to optimize the file server. Technically, it’s a masterpiece. He submits it for approval. The manager, seeing the "Excel Spreadsheet" of changes, sees "Server Optimization" and hits approve.
- The Result: The engineer runs it at 10:00 AM on a Monday. The server reboots. The entire sales team, who was in the middle of a high-pressure quarterly close, loses their connections.
- The Fix: This was an Operational failure. A separate Schedule Check would have flagged the time as "High Impact."
Scenario B: The Perfect Window for a Disaster
A company decides to migrate their database at 3:00 AM on a Sunday. Everyone agrees the window is perfect. The manager approves the change because "Sunday morning is safe."
- The Result: The engineer’s migration script had a typo in the destination URI. Because no technical peer reviewed the logic, the migration failed, and the database was corrupted.
- The Fix: This was a Technical failure. A mandatory Logic Check by a senior peer would have spotted the URI typo before the window ever opened.
How ChangeBreeze Automates the Dual-Stage Engine
At ChangeBreeze, we didn't just build another tool to tick boxes. We built a structured framework that enforces these ITIL best practices without the traditional overhead.
Our Change Plan platform is designed from the ground up to support the separation of duties:
- Explicit Technical & Operational Roles: In ChangeBreeze, every change can be assigned a Technical Approver and an Operational Approver. The workflow ensures that the "Logic Check" happens first.
- Structured Implementation Plans: We move engineers away from vague descriptions and into detailed implementation, test, and rollback steps that are easy for peers to audit.
- Zero Spreadsheet Chaos: By centralizing these approvals, you eliminate the "Who said we could do this?" conversations. The audit trail is permanent, un-editable, and visible to everyone.
Why Separating Approvals Reduces Friction
When you use a tool like ChangeBreeze to separate these gates, you actually speed up your deployment velocity:
- Engineers can peer-review each other's work instantly, getting the "Technical" green light as soon as the code is ready.
- Managers can then look at a queue of "Technically Validated" changes and simply decide which ones fit into the upcoming maintenance windows.
It turns a stressful, contentious process into an assembly line of high-quality, low-risk deployments.
The Strategic Business Impact
Separating Technical and Operational approvals isn't just about following ITIL rules; it's about business outcomes:
- Faster "Time to Resolution": When a change is rejected, the reason is clear. Technical Rejection means "Fix your implementation plan." Operational Rejection usually means "Pick a better time."
- Improved Developer Experience: Engineers feel more confident knowing their peers have their back on the technical side, and they don't have to argue with "non-technical" managers about the validity of their code.
- MSP Scalability: For MSPs managing dozens of clients, this discipline is the only way to scale. You can't have one person trying to understand the technical nuances and business schedules of 50 different companies at once.
Conclusion: Precision in Every Change
Stop hoping your changes work. Start knowing they will.
By separating the Technical Check from the Schedule Check, you remove the guesswork from your IT operations. You empower your technical stars to ensure quality, and you empower your business leaders to ensure stability.
Change management doesn't have to be a grind. With the right philosophy and the right tools, it becomes your greatest competitive advantage.
Ready to bring ITIL discipline to your team without the "Spreadsheet Chaos"?