Change Advisory Board: A Change Calendar That Absorbs Emergencies and Customer Requests

Two windows a week and a queue that never sits still

Change advisory boards work from a compact policy. Standard changes go into the Tuesday or Thursday window, each window holds a set number of changes and only one high-risk one, a change needs an approved pull request and a rollback plan before it is placed, and nothing lands inside a customer's blackout. Applied on Monday, the policy produces a clean week. By Wednesday an emergency change has arrived, a customer has asked to move a date and a security clearance has come through late.

Change requests live in ClickUp, the pull requests behind them in GitHub and the policy in Google Drive. Customer requests come into a shared Outlook mailbox, service teams post clearances in Slack, and the closeout emails go out from Gmail. The schedule is rebuilt by hand each time something moves, and the change that slips is usually the one an emergency displaced and nobody re-placed.

Who works in the room

The board has one Kylon room, and Ryan is its default agent, so a new request or a question about a window goes to Ryan. Questions about the coordinator's agenda go to Fin, and anything that leaves the team, whether a customer reply or a closeout, goes to Ada, as the room guidelines say. Ryan hands each approved move to Ada by mentioning it in the thread with the moved requests listed, so a customer never hears about a date before the change manager has approved it.

From Monday intake to the Friday cutoff

Intake closes Monday at noon, and an automation opens the cutoff run on Friday at noon. In between, every placement is written to ClickUp only after the change manager approves it in the thread.

When an emergency or an amendment reshuffles the week

An emergency is placed by its own rule: it takes the next window and pushes out the lowest-priority standard change already there. Ryan does not stop at the emergency. It re-places the displaced change in the next window with room, which can push out something else, and it shows the whole chain in the thread before anything is written. The change manager approves the chain, not just the first move.

A risk-policy amendment is harder, because it changes the rules every earlier placement was made under. When the board decides that schema migrations now count as high risk, a Thursday window holding two of them is over its limit. Ryan re-checks every placed change against the amended policy, not only the ones the amendment names, and proposes the displacements in priority order. Late clearances that arrive in Slack the same afternoon are placed only if a window under the new rules still has room.

What the checks catch

• A displaced change that never got a new window because the emergency was the only move anyone recorded
• A window over its high-risk limit after an amendment reclassified changes already placed there
• A change placed inside a customer's blackout dates
• A change marked ready whose pull request lost its approval after a new push
• Held and deferred changes that reach the cutoff without their one retry

What stays with people

• Approving each placement, displacement and carry-forward before ClickUp is updated
• Declaring a change an emergency, and cancelling a change instead of carrying it forward
• Confirming a moved date with the customer and sending the reply Ada drafts in Outlook
• Sending each per-service closeout email, which Ada prepares as a Gmail draft

Integrations in this workflow

Kylon is not a change management system, and it does not replace one. It works across the tracker, the code host and the mailboxes the board already uses, and keeps the coordination between them in one room.

• ClickUp
• GitHub
• Gmail
• Google Drive
• Outlook
• Slack

• ClickUp holds every change request with its risk level, window and status
• GitHub shows whether the pull request behind each change is approved and passing its checks
• Google Drive keeps the CAB policy, each amendment and the coordinator's draft agenda
• Outlook is the shared change mailbox where customer window requests arrive and replies are drafted for a person to send
• Gmail carries the per-service closeout emails, each sent by a person from Ada's draft
• Slack is where service teams and security post late clearances, and where the approved schedule is shared

Where to start

Begin with one week of requests for one group of services. Connect the ClickUp space that holds change requests, give Ryan read access to the repositories behind them, and add one rule to the room guidelines: an agent may propose placements and displacements, and the change manager approves every one before ClickUp changes or anyone outside the room hears about it.

“The emergency still takes Tuesday. The difference is that the change it pushed out already has a new window, approved in the same thread.”

Set it up with your agent

Open a new Room, add your agent and paste this prompt. It connects the tools, builds the App with you and asks for your rules one step at a time, and nothing goes out until a person approves it.