T2S/08/299

• 14 pages
• Restricted
• November 26, 2008

Introduction

The T2S Advisory Group (AG) agreed on the User Requirements Document (URD) at their meeting on 15 May 2008. The URD was subsequently agreed by the ECB decision-making bodies as the reference for the specification phase: only those requirements described in the URD will correspond to T2S delivered functionalities, unless changes are adopted by the ECB Governing Council.

Indeed, the evolution of market needs during the remaining project time and beyond may require modifications to, or the inclusion of new requirements into the URD. Moreover, certain requirements may appear ambiguous in the URD and would require clarification. Furthermore as a result of the continued bilateral meetings between the ECB T2S Project Team and different market actors, it is possible that gaps in the URD may be identified. Therefore, the URD may need to gradually evolve. However, in particular during the project phase, flexibility to modify the URD with new requests should have limits: each change to the requirements takes resources. Studying enhancements or new functionalities, even if eventually not implemented, introduces workload and has a time impact and is thus a project risk factor.
To balance necessary flexibility with keeping the project under control, it is of utmost importance that a
strict change management process is implemented to ensure that the impact of any change to the URD is
well identified and adequately managed.

The present document describes the process leading the submission of requests for changing the User
requirements to the ECB Governing Council. This process will be regularly reviewed by the ECB T2S
Project Team to check its adequacy and take into account evolutions in the project. As owner of this
document the AG will approve any modification to the change management process.

For the time being, the procedure described in this document applies to the modifications to the
User Requirements Documents only, and is limited to the period prior to the establishment of a
legal arrangement with the CSDs. Given the limited time until then, the addition of national
specificities, or requests for new requirements that are intended/reserved for specific CSDs, is
currently not covered in this document.

As the User Requirements will be part of the legal agreement between the Eurosystem and the
CSDs, the change management process will be reviewed as part of the discussions about the
contractual relationship. In this context, the implementation of national specificities or CSDspecific
requirements in T2S will be further examined and, pending agreement on the modalities,
will be covered in those new change management procedures.

Consequently, all changes that are approved according to the procedures described in this
document will be part of the core T2S service. If change requests are rejected according to these
procedures, they can be re-introduced as national specificities or as CSD-specific requirements, in
which case they will be managed according to the change management procedures that will be part
of the legal arrangements with the CSDs.

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1. Validity of the change management process

The change management process is valid from the date of approval by the AG. It may have to be
amended when a legally binding agreement between the Eurosystem and the CSDs is implemented.
Version 4.0 of the URD is the baseline to which the process will be applied.

The change management process is aligned with the current governance structure. A new release of the
change management process, reflecting the next governance structure, may be necessary.

The adoption of a new/revised change management process does not affect the already approved changes.
Not yet approved change requests will need to follow the revised procedure.

2. Limits of the change management process

The present document covers only the URD and not the management of changes to future other T2S
deliverables, such as the General Specifications (GS), the General Functional Specifications (GFS) and
the User Detailed Functional Specifications (UDFS) or the User Handbook (UHB). It is likely that
changes in the URD will impact other project deliverables and hence this change management process
will need to be considered in connection with other areas of the project that may be subject to other
change management procedures. Merging all change management procedures into one change
management manual will be considered in due course since it is vital that traceability of the requirements
described in the URD is maintained across all project deliverables.

3. Submitting a change request1

Any project stakeholder such as a CSD, a market user, a T2S National User Group, the developer and
future operator of the T2S system, an external stakeholder, or the ECB T2S Project Team may identify a
need to change the User Requirements. However, in order to ensure that there is no “overflow” of change
requests, it is proposed that only AG Members and Observers can officially request changes to the T2S

User Requirements.

Entities not represented in the AG (either as member or as observer) must address the change request to
an AG Member or an Observer who will submit the change request to the T2S Project Team in the
adequate format.

The ECB T2S Project Team will be responsible for co-ordinating this change management process and
maintaining the log of requested changes.

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