What is a Rollback Plan?
We live in a very complex world that is getting more so every day. There are so many variables that exist in our systems that it is very conceivable that even a well planned change may fail during implementation into production. I always like to tell the story that even special forces teams have an exit strategy for their operations in case things go sour. For us, rather than risk compromising the service should a change implementation fail, or look likely to fail, installation teams must be prepared to restore the service to its previous state (or an approved state) in a predictable, efficient and effective manner. This planning must be done prior to implementation and is known as a “rollback plan” in Visible Ops, or “back out plan” in ITIL.
The Change Management process governs the creation of back out plans for each change. In accordance with the Release Policy, Release Management will verify the contents of the rollback plan and test to ensure they work for the release. The reason for this occurring in Release Management is two-fold. First, a given release may be comprised of several changes that are then condensed into the back out plan for the release, which is then tested accordingly. Second, Change Management is a risk management function while Release Management is really the quality control process that safeguards production. This different perspective of protecting production can be very beneficial.
Different organizations have different technologies, risks, and resources. As such, a Release Policy can be developed that documents what elements must be present in a back out plan and what degree of minimal testing is required. For each change, the plan may very from keying back in configuration values all the way up to a full system restore.
The intent of all this is to have a way to recover should the installation of a change fail. It is far better to figure this out in advance and confirm that such has been done. That is why we explicitly mention the need for a rollback plan in Phase One of Visible Ops.