Change Management Policy

Table of Contents

Background

Social Sync is always improving its features and services for the benefit of our clients and their customers.  To ensure that change and improvement causes the least disruption we have established these change management principles;

  • Transparency: what, when and why changes are being made
  • Continuity: minimising impact and disruption to production systems,
  • Quality: everything tested before implementation and deployment to production,
  • Redundancy: deprecation of any existing features should be managed in a way that doesn’t impact on any live customer campaigns

Change Requests

Anyone can submit a change or feature request internally or externally through; their Customer Success representative, line manager or emailing product@socialsync.io

All requests are added to the Change Request Log for review.

Change Prioritisation

The Product Team meet on a weekly basis to review progress against the formal product road map and prioritise any new change requests;

  • Urgent: in some rare instances a change request may be categorised as urgent where change is necessary for a existing product feature such as changes to regulations, laws or third-party integrations. For requests categorised as Urgent the Product Team will immediately begin a feasibility study on these change requests.
  • High: where the Product Team receive multiple requests for the same change or feature already on the Social Sync product road map these changes will be categorised as High priority and will influence planning cycles.
  • Medium: where the Product Team receive multiple requests for the same change or feature which is seen to align with the Social Sync product vision and product roadmap these changes will be categorised as Medium priority and may influence planning cycles.
  • Low: where the Product Team receive requests for a change or feature which has the potential to add value to clients and/or their customers but does not align with the Social Sync vision and product roadmap these changes will be categorised as Low and will be considered during planning cycles.

Feasibility study

All change requests must also pass through a feasibility stage of the planning process.  Feasibility will be assessed in terms of the following four criteria:

  • Technological considerations: e.g. can this be done? what technology will be required?
  • Consolidation: e.g. is this request already included in the roadmap or superseded by already planned changes?
  • Impact assessment: how will it improve the platform? which users will be impacted?
  • Resourcing: how long will it take? what is the expected cost to deliver the feature? Sprint planning considerations.

Implementation and Deployment

Once a change project has been completed customers will be notified in writing.  Social Workshop Ltd will always strive to give clients as much notice as possible but as a minimum;

  • One month:
    • Significant functionality changes to exisiting features, that may pose a disruption to internal customer processes,
    • All new third party integrations,
    • Significant new product features.
  • 7 days;
    • Significant user interface changes,
    • Changes to existing product features, that are deemed to pose minimal disruption to internal customer processes,
    • New product features, that are deemed to pose minimal disruption to internal customer processes,
  • In some rare cases it may be necessary to implement changes with less than 7 days notice such as in response to an urgent regulatory or third party system change. In these instances Social Workshop Ltd will always provide as much notice as possible and take every reasonable effort to mitigate disruption on existing services.

Revision history

Version Date Description of Changes
V1 August 31st, 2022 Creation and publication