A Change Management System Based on Pareto’s Law
In 1994, I was appointed director of a project management office (PMO) that was created at the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) Mid-Atlantic Region as part of Vice President Gore’s Reinvention of Government (RG) initiative. The PMO was created to provide more effective oversight of large complex construction projects and organize more effective and flexible deployment of resources in alignment with critical needs.
At the time, there was no systematic approach to evaluating proposed changes (“change orders”) before they were approved. Analytic resources were applied in the same manner to all proposed changes without regard to risk potential, resulting in a ‘forest–trees’ kind of scenario, where resources were wasted doing in-depth analyses of numerous low-impact changes, while consequent deferred analyses of high impact changes increased risk exposure exponentially. Lack of timely decision making greatly increased the ultimate costs of changes and also adversely affected project schedule, quality, customer satisfaction, and project team functioning.
Under the RG initiative, calls came out for proposals for business process reviews (BPRs). Our region proposed analyzing the change order history, with the goal of developing a more effective way of processing them.
Our BPR team began by sorting and categorizing our …
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