Page 259 - Project+

Scope change

These change requests might come from the project sponsor, stakeholders, team
members, vendors, and others. You’ll want to understand the factors that bring about
change, such as those listed here, and how a proposed change might impact the project
if it’s implemented.

The types of changes others may ask for are limitless. In addition, change requests may
also take the form of corrective actions, preventive actions, or defect repairs. These

usually come about from monitoring the actual project work results. Let’s take a look at
a brief description of each of these:

Corrective Actions Corrective actions bring the work of the project into alignment
with the project management plan.

Preventive Actions Preventive actions are implemented to help reduce the
probability of a negative risk event.

Defect Repairs Defect repairs either correct or replace components that are
substandard or are malfunctioning.

The most important aspect of change in terms of project management is having a

robust change control system in place to deal with the requests. Change control
systems are documented procedures that describe how the deliverables of the project
are controlled, changed, and approved. They also describe and manage the
documentation required to request and track the changes and the updates to the
project management plan.

The key to avoiding chaos is to manage change in an organized fashion with an
integrated change control system that looks at the impact of any change across all

aspects of the project plan. Changes, no matter how small, have an impact on the triple
constraints (time, cost, or scope), and they may also impact quality or any combination
of these factors. Not having a process to analyze the impact of the change and
determine whether it’s worth the extra time, money, and so on to implement is a recipe
for project failure.

In my experience, the three biggest project killers brought about by the
project manager are lack of adequate planning, poor risk planning, and inadequate
change control processes.

There are several aspects to an effective change management system. You’ll look at
each of these elements throughout this section. The change management process
includes the following:

Identify and document the change request.

Track requests in the change request log.

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