Score a network change's risk from blast radius, rollback feasibility, testing and timing, then get a recommended approval path.
Blast radius carries the most weight because it scales the consequence of everything else. Outage and rollback durations are scored against a one-hour reference, and the two flags add fixed penalties for the practices that most reliably turn a change into an incident. Change-related failures are the largest single cause of network outages, and a numeric score is what makes the approval path defensible rather than political.
Change Impact
risk = blast radius × 0.4 + outage score (20) + rollback score (15) + 15 if untested + 10 if outside a window.
risk = blast radius × 0.4 + outage score (20) + rollback score (15) + 15 if untested + 10 if outside a window. Blast radius carries the most weight because it scales the consequence of everything else. Outage and rollback durations are scored against a one-hour reference, and the two flags add fixed penalties for the practices that most reliably turn a change into an incident.
Change-related failures are the largest single cause of network outages, and a numeric score is what makes the approval path defensible rather than political.
This calculator takes 6 inputs: Users affected if the change fails, Total users on the network, Expected service interruption, Time to roll back, Change validated in a lab or staging network, Executed inside an approved maintenance window. The pre-filled defaults are a realistic starting point — replace them with figures from your own environment for a result you can act on.