Change Risk Assessment & Approval Automation

Change management is critical to IT stability yet painfully manual. Change Advisory Board (CAB) members spend hours reviewing change requests, assessing risk, identifying conflicts, and determining approval requirements. Poor risk assessment leads to failed changes (industry average: 30-40% failure rate), unplanned outages, and rollbacks. Meanwhile, low-risk changes languish in approval queues, slowing velocity. Traditional ServiceNow workflows lack the intelligence to distinguish routine patches from high-risk infrastructure changes.

Workflow goal

Automate change risk assessment, conflict detection, and approval routing to reduce CAB review time by 60% while improving change success rates and accelerating low-risk changes.

  • Change Manager

  • CAB Members

  • Release Management

  • Infrastructure Teams

End-to-End Agentic Flow
1

Change Request Intake

  • Ingest change request from ServiceNow

  • Extract scope, timing, affected CIs, implementation plan

2

Risk Assessment

  • Analyze change type, scope, and complexity

  • Evaluate historical success rate for similar changes

  • Assess affected systems' criticality and redundancy

  • Check timing against blackout windows and peak usage

3

Impact Analysis

  • Query CMDB for dependent services and applications

  • Identify upstream/downstream dependencies

  • Estimate blast radius if change fails

  • Flag potential user/business impact

4

Conflict Detection

  • Check for overlapping changes to same systems

  • Identify resource contention or maintenance windows

  • Detect changes that could compound risk

5

Approval Routing

  • Determine approval level based on risk score (standard/normal/major/emergency)

  • Route to appropriate approvers (auto-approve, peer review, CAB, executive)

  • Generate risk summary and recommendations for approvers

6

Pre-Implementation Validation

  • Verify implementation plan completeness

  • Check rollback procedures are documented

  • Confirm required testing and validation steps

7

Post-Implementation Tracking

  • Monitor for incidents related to change

  • Capture success/failure outcome

  • Update risk models based on actual results

  • CMDB relationship analysis

  • Historical pattern recognition

  • Multi-factor risk scoring

  • Intelligent approval routing

  • Human approval always required for high-risk changes

  • CAB review mandatory for major changes

  • Emergency change escalation to senior leadership

  • Read-only access to production systems during assessment

  • Change success rate

  • Mean time to approval (by risk category)

  • Auto-approved change percentage

  • CAB meeting preparation time

  • Failed change root cause attribution

  • Risk prediction accuracy

Access Request Automation