The CAB workbench is a view over your issues, approvals and freeze windows. There is no meeting object to create, no agenda to assemble and no board membership to maintain — because authority here is per-approval and delegable, and modelling a board would be modelling a fiction.
Opening it
In your project sidebar, select CAB workbench. Every agent can see it.
The order, and why it is that order
Ordering is the workbench’s only real opinion, so it is worth knowing what it is:
- 1
Anything awaiting you
Whatever its risk. The agenda’s job is to tell one person what to do next; burying your own queue under a project-wide risk ordering makes you scroll for it every time.
- 2
Freeze conflicts
They are blocked until a human acts, so they need a decision before anything else can move.
- 3
Risk, descending
High before medium before low.
- 4
The soonest planned window
With unscheduled changes last, so a blank start never reads as imminent.
Working the meeting
- 1
Start with In freeze
Anything blocked needs rescheduling or an administrator’s override. Nothing else can progress until these are settled.
- 2
Then High risk
The changes most worth the room’s attention. Open the issue from the workbench to read the detail.
- 3
Then Emergency
Changes already made under emergency rules. This is the retrospective part of the meeting — what happened, and was the record right?
- 4
Ask everyone to clear Awaiting me
Each person filters to their own queue and answers from the issue panel. The meeting ends with decisions recorded rather than actions to write up.
Reading a row
- Change — the Jira key. Open it to see everything.
- Summary — the issue summary, with “awaiting you” appended where it applies.
- Risk and Type — as recorded on the change.
- Planned — the start of the planned window, in your timezone. An em dash means unscheduled.
- Approvals — “2 of 3 approved”, or “No approvers requested”, or a rejection count. A rejection is always reported ahead of the approval count.
- Status — governance status, plus a freeze marker where relevant.
What the workbench does not do
- It does not schedule meetings. Use your calendar; the workbench is what you look at during one.
- It does not approve in bulk. Each approval names a person and is answered individually, on purpose.
- It does not show untracked issues. Only changes somebody has recorded governance for appear. An empty workbench in a busy project usually means people have not been recording changes.