Hidden Costs of Change

Bart has been in ecommerce for over 20 years, and can't imagine a better job to have. He is interested in all things agile, or anything new to learn.

  Change Management   ProjectsAtWork  

Changes, even when they are for the better of your project, come at a price. But it can be difficult to measure the true cost. Let’s look at five types of hidden costs that change can bring to a project, from the schedule to team performance, and what we as project managers can do about them.

Projects are full of changes. Requirements change, team members change, customers change, and the market shifts and tilts under our feet at all times. I have worked on consulting projects where there were so many documented changes that it was nearly impossible to get a handle on what we were actually meant to deliver. While we did have an initial statement of the goals and key performance indicators for the project, it wound up having little relationship to the final deliverable.

But here’s the thing: not only was this okay, it was actually desired. What we wound up doing turned out to be much more valuable. In fact, much of the Agile family of methodologies were created to better accommodate altering course — and accepting it as part of the reality of the project.

It is difficult to properly capture the true cost of change to a project, however. No matter how much better the new direction is, something gets lost along the way. It could be energy, momentum, clarity, or some other difficult-to-measure aspect of good management. Change, even for the better, comes at …

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