The practice of ensuring that risks are properly assessed, authorizing changes to proceed, and managing a change schedule in order to maximize the number of successful service and product changes. Note: ITIL 4 renamed "Change Management" to "Change Control" (and later "Change Enablement") to emphasize the broader scope.
Without effective change control, unauthorized changes lead to "shadow IT," configuration drift, and unrecoverable outages. However, excessive control stifles innovation.
We prefer the term Change Enablement. The goal isn't to stop changes; it's to make them happen safely and quickly. We implement "Guardrails, not Gates"—automated policy checks that allow compliant changes to flow through to production without human intervention.