Change Advisory Board

A forum that meets on a cadence to approve, reject or reschedule planned production changes. The term comes from ITIL and appears in nearly every change-management framework.

In patching the board is usually not the bottleneck, because it approves policy rather than each window. What it does decide is which change types are pre-approved (a standard change) and which need individual discussion. A monthly cumulative update on a non-critical system normally belongs in the first category.

That separation matters: a board that discusses every patch individually creates a queue, and the queue is itself the reason windows slip.