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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Change Coordinator

💰 $50,000 - $90,000

ITChange ManagementOperationsService Management

🎯 Role Definition

The Change Coordinator is a dedicated operational role within IT and enterprise service management responsible for the administration, orchestration and quality control of the change lifecycle. Working closely with Service Owners, Release Managers, engineers and Change Advisory Boards (CAB), the Change Coordinator ensures changes are logged, assessed, scheduled, approved and implemented with minimal risk to live services. The role emphasizes process adherence (ITIL best practices), accurate documentation (RFCs, testing, backout plans), cross-functional communication and continuous improvement of change delivery.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • IT Service Desk Analyst or Service Delivery Analyst transitioning into change operations.
  • Release or Deployment Coordinator supporting release pipelines.
  • Junior Project Coordinator with exposure to change processes and service management.

Advancement To:

  • Senior Change Manager / Change Lead
  • Release Manager or Service Transition Manager
  • IT Service Management (ITSM) Manager or Operations Manager

Lateral Moves:

  • Release/Deployment Coordinator
  • Configuration Management/CMDB Analyst
  • Incident or Problem Management Specialist

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Coordinate end-to-end change lifecycle activities by creating, validating and managing Requests for Change (RFCs) in the change management tool (for example ServiceNow, Cherwell, JIRA) and ensuring all required fields, attachments and approvals are present before scheduling.
  • Serve as the central point of contact for change-related communications; proactively inform stakeholders, change owners and affected business units of upcoming, emergency and cancelled changes via email, bulletin and the change calendar.
  • Facilitate and administer Change Advisory Board (CAB) meetings—prepare agendas, distribute RFC packets, record decisions, produce minutes and follow up on action items to ensure timely approvals and risk mitigation.
  • Perform risk and impact assessments on proposed changes in collaboration with technical owners and business stakeholders, documenting dependencies, fallback/backout plans and service impact in RFCs.
  • Maintain and govern the change calendar, coordinating with release managers and project teams to prevent scheduling conflicts, ensure blackout windows are observed and optimize deployment windows for minimal business impact.
  • Validate that pre-implementation criteria are met (testing sign-offs, validation results, stakeholder approvals, resource availability) before authorizing change execution.
  • Track and record the implementation status of changes during implementation windows and coordinate emergency change procedures, initiating rapid CAB approvals when required and ensuring post-implementation verification.
  • Manage post-implementation review (PIR) process—collect test evidence, confirm success objectives, record lessons learned, update knowledge base articles and escalate recurring failures to continuous improvement forums.
  • Enforce change process compliance and governance—identify non-conforming changes, raise process exceptions, recommend corrective actions and work with Process Owners to update SOPs and workflows.
  • Own change-related metrics and reporting: generate weekly and monthly dashboards (change success rate, emergency change count, failed changes, lead times), present findings to stakeholders and propose measurable improvement initiatives.
  • Administer and maintain change-related configuration data in the CMDB; ensure CI (Configuration Item) references in RFCs are accurate and updated as part of the change record lifecycle.
  • Coordinate cross-functional resources and vendors for complex changes, ensuring third-party scheduling, access approvals and contractual obligations are addressed prior to execution.
  • Support release management by aligning release schedules to the change calendar, verifying release contents against RFCs and coordinating cutover/rollback activities with operations teams.
  • Triage incoming change requests to ensure they are classified correctly (standard, normal, emergency), routed to the appropriate owner and prioritized based on business impact and urgency.
  • Ensure change notifications, runbooks, test plans and backout procedures are documented and accessible to implementers and support teams prior to execution.
  • Monitor live changes during implementation to detect and escalate incidents quickly, coordinate immediate remediation or rollback, and communicate status to business stakeholders.
  • Facilitate readiness gates and pre-deployment checklists, validating that deployments meet security, compliance and operational readiness standards.
  • Coordinate and facilitate emergency change procedures including capture of emergency RFCs, expedited CAB approvals, logging of emergency rationale and retrospective reviews.
  • Partner with Change Managers and Continual Service Improvement (CSI) teams to review failed or high-risk changes, coordinate root-cause analysis (RCA) and ensure remediation actions are tracked to closure.
  • Support periodic audits and compliance reviews by providing change records, evidence of approvals, audit trails and demonstrating adherence to policies and standards.
  • Maintain and improve change-related documentation, templates, runbooks and knowledge articles to accelerate onboarding and reduce process ambiguity.
  • Provide coaching and onboarding for change request submitters and change owners on best practices, tool usage and process expectations to raise overall change quality.

Secondary Functions

  • Maintain and publish the organizational change calendar and blackout/maintenance windows to reduce cross-team collisions and negative user impact.
  • Prepare executive and operational summaries of change activity, highlighting trends, risks and recommendations.
  • Run quality assurance checks on RFC content to ensure test evidence, business approvals and rollback plans meet the organization’s gating criteria.
  • Contribute to the evolution of the change workflow, automation opportunities and tool configuration to reduce manual effort and human error.
  • Build and maintain relationships with service owners, security, capacity and risk teams to embed risk controls into change design.
  • Assist with training materials and periodic change management workshops for IT and business teams.
  • Support ad-hoc reporting requests and data extracts for governance boards and audit committees.
  • Participate in service transition planning meetings to ensure changes are aligned with new service onboarding and decommission schedules.
  • Manage access controls and roles within the change management tool to enforce segregation of duties and approval chains.
  • Act as a point of contact for vendors and third-party providers during scheduled maintenance and change windows to ensure coordination and accountability.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Proficient with enterprise change management tools such as ServiceNow Change Management, BMC Remedy, Cherwell or JIRA Service Management — create, update and close RFCs with accurate metadata.
  • Working knowledge of ITIL v3/v4 change and service transition processes, including standard/normal/emergency change models and CAB governance.
  • Experience coordinating Change Advisory Board (CAB) processes: agenda creation, RFC pack assembly, minute taking and tracking approvals.
  • Solid understanding of release and deployment practices, including cutover planning, rollback procedures and release windows.
  • Ability to perform risk and impact assessments, including identification of affected Configuration Items (CIs) tied to the CMDB.
  • Familiarity with CMDB concepts and ability to verify CI mappings and maintain configuration records related to changes.
  • Experience generating operational reports and dashboards in Excel, Power BI, Tableau or the change tool reporting modules; comfortable with metrics such as change success rate, lead time and MTTR following change.
  • Basic scripting or workflow configuration experience (optional but advantageous) to assist in tool automation and rule creation.
  • Knowledge of incident and problem management relationships to ensure changes address root causes and avoid repeat outages.
  • Understanding of compliance, regulatory and audit requirements tied to controlled changes and ability to provide evidence for audits.
  • Vendor coordination skills and familiarity with third-party change coordination and contractual change notifications.
  • Proficient in common collaboration tools: MS Office (Excel, PowerPoint), Confluence, Teams/Slack, and calendaring systems.

Soft Skills

  • Strong written and verbal communication skills geared toward technical and non-technical audiences; capable of producing clear RFCs, CAB packs and executive summaries.
  • Excellent stakeholder management and relationship-building skills; able to influence engineers, managers and business stakeholders to achieve approvals and readiness.
  • Attention to detail and process orientation — rigorous about completeness of change records and adherence to governance.
  • Time management and prioritization skills to coordinate multiple concurrent changes and competing deadlines.
  • Problem-solving mindset with the ability to escalate appropriately and coordinate rapid remediation during incidents.
  • Facilitation skills for running CAB sessions, readiness meetings and post-implementation reviews.
  • Customer-service focus and resilience under pressure—managing emergency changes and high visibility incidents calmly.
  • Continuous improvement orientation—proactively identifying process inefficiencies and recommending tool/process enhancements.
  • Analytical mindset for interpreting change metrics and supporting data-driven decisions.
  • Empathy and interpersonal tact when communicating sensitive scheduling decisions or outage impacts.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience in IT, Computer Science, Information Systems, Business Administration or a related field. Associate degree plus demonstrated experience may be acceptable.

Preferred Education:

  • Bachelor’s degree in IT, Information Systems, Business Management or related discipline.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Information Technology
  • Computer Science
  • Business Administration
  • IT Service Management

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 2–5 years in IT operations, service management, release coordination or change management support roles.

Preferred:

  • 3+ years of direct experience coordinating changes in enterprise environments with exposure to ServiceNow or other ITSM tools; proven track record supporting CABs and release cycles.
  • Certifications such as ITIL Foundation (required/preferred), ITIL Practitioner, Change Management Practitioner, PRINCE2 Foundation/Practitioner or equivalent are highly desirable.

Keywords: Change Coordinator, change management, ITIL, RFC, ServiceNow, CAB, change calendar, release management, CMDB, emergency change, post-implementation review, service transition, IT service management, change governance.

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