CAB meetings and actions

Who this is for: agents — and whoever chairs your change advisory board.

Where to go

Your project → Concessa → CAB workbench.

Meetings

If a project administrator has set a CAB schedule (guide 1), opening the workbench shows a next-meeting card — the date, time and time zone, how many people have been invited and how many have attended so far, and how many changes are attached — plus a table of every meeting the schedule has produced, scheduled and past. The card names the time zone; the table’s own When column does not repeat it, and shows the same schedule’s wall clock.

Filter the table by status with the chips above it. It opens on Scheduled — the meetings still to deal with, soonest first, so the next one is at the top of the list. Every other filter reads newest first, because it is a record of what has already happened. All is at the end of the row. Each chip carries its own count, taken from every meeting on file rather than from whatever is currently shown, so the numbers do not move as you click between them.

Meetings are created automatically from the schedule, up to a rolling horizon your administrator sets (eight weeks by default). Nobody types a meeting’s date by hand, and nothing is ever created in the past. If no schedule is set yet there is no card at all: the meetings section reads No meetings yet, and explains that a project administrator sets the cadence in project settings.

A scheduled meeting’s attendance reads as invitations — “7 invited” — because nobody has attended anything yet. Once the chair has recorded attendance marks it reads as “5 attended, 2 apologies”. A cancelled meeting says “Not held” — zero attended and never sat are different facts, and the wording says which one this is.

Running a meeting

Select a meeting’s date and time in the meetings table to see its detail: attendees, agenda, attached changes and actions. The change agenda steps aside while a meeting is open, so the page holds one job at a time; Back to meetings brings it back.

• Attendees. Search and add anyone the project would let you assign work to — not only people who use Concessa. Mark each person invited, attended or apologies as the meeting proceeds.
• Agenda. Every meeting starts with the standing items your administrator set. Add, edit, reorder or remove items on this meeting without touching the template that produced it — your changes here affect only this meeting. Reordering and removing are the arrow and cross controls beside each item; every icon on this page names itself when you hover or focus it.
• Changes. Attach a change by its issue key, or add one straight from the Suggested list — changes planned before the next meeting that are not attached yet.

Record attendance, and invite everyone who might take an action, before you mark the meeting held. Both the attendee list and every attendance mark freeze the moment a meeting is held — that is deliberate, because attendance is part of what the hold seals, and a sealed record that can still be edited is not a record. An action’s owner must already be on the attendee list, so somebody forgotten before the hold cannot be given an action afterwards. If you think someone might need to own an action, invite them before you close the meeting, not after.

Mark as held asks you to confirm first, naming how many changes are about to receive a comment in Jira. Holding then seals the agenda, the attendee list, the attendance marks and the attached changes — none of them can be edited afterwards — and posts a short comment on each attached change saying it was reviewed at this CAB. If Jira refuses a comment, the meeting is still held — it happened whether or not the courtesy copy landed — and the affected changes are named on the page with a Retry notices control.

Cancel meeting requires a reason and posts no comments, because the changes attached to a cancelled meeting were not reviewed. They reappear as suggestions at the next meeting.

Neither a held nor a cancelled meeting can be reopened. There is no delete path for a meeting, held, cancelled or still scheduled.

Actions

Actions are what a meeting decided to do, recorded against the meeting that raised them: a description, an owner chosen from that meeting’s attendees, an optional due date, and an optional link to a change. Unlike the rest of a held meeting, actions stay editable afterwards — the work an action describes usually outlives the meeting that raised it — and you can mark one done or reopen it once the meeting has been held. A cancelled meeting takes no new actions, and its existing actions become a record too: nothing about them can be changed.

The workbench lists every open action across every meeting, soonest due first with undated actions last, each naming which meeting raised it and which change it relates to if any. An overdue action says Overdue in words next to its due date, not only in colour.