Project Change Management

It is essential to have a project change management process in place in order for your project manager to effectively administer and cover all activities within their projects. The steps involved in handling change are actually quite straightforward and are intended to ensure your projects do not suffer from scope creep.

The entire project management change process begins with the project manager receiving change requests. These are alterations to the existing project plan listing new activities or alterations to existing program activities. The project manager initially classifies these based on the level of severity or desirability.

These changes can initially be evaluated internally within the team to establish if contingency can be used to actually implement the alterations. This can occur on many occasions if the change is quite small or the alteration actually reduces the time involved on specific activity.

It is more likely however that the project change management process will proceed to a steering meeting to discuss the change. This meeting is chaired by the project manager and should incorporate the original requester of the change as well as your project sponsor. The alteration is discussed and debated to establish why it should be implemented. The group also need to discuss what work may be affected, or need to be dropped, as a result of these alterations being implemented.

The project manager documents the entire meeting by the minutes and then updates their own project proposal template as well as the work breakdown structure for the project. Any change requests that are to be implemented should be promptly communicated to the relevant parties. For example, changes in IT projects often have to be filtered down to the various engineers tasked with doing that work.

The entire project change management procedure is a key focus for the project manager and can be effectively administered through effective documentation and communication.