The change should be taken up for planning for realization, based on its priority and impact. Prioritization is used to establish the order in which changes should be considered. The Change Plan must include details of all changes that have been authorised for realization, and their proposed dates as per internal and business approval. These details should include task wise information on the development and deployment (or distribution) of each change. Releases or scheduled maintenance slots must be allocated to each of these changes. The Change Plan should be communicated to all Customers (or their representatives), application developers, service staff including the Service Desk, and any other interested parties, since the proposed changes and their timing would affect planning and practices in many areas, both within and outside Service Management.

Resources, effort and time lines should be identified for development, testing and deployment of the change. The change should be estimated in terms of efforts and schedule, based on the timeline provided for implementation and resources. Tasks, activities and plans should be created, assigned and distributed to respective Delivery Teams for developing the change. At the beginning itself, the Change Manager should determine the extent to which the change should be evaluated. Depending on the nature of the change, evaluation should be planned across different stages of change realization and implementation.