I´m assigned writing a new change management plan from a project perspective. I´m trying to grasp the assignment without making this more complicated than it really is. I believe myself to know what change management is about; the formal process for making changes to the project´s original scope.
Now, in the applicable environment there is an organization with 100+ systems maintained by several organizational units and each system follows the same change process where also an application is involved. Here, we are of course talking about changes that eventually result in a change in some system.
Historically, large projects have defined their own change management plans with or without a change control board for example (to serve as a project approval function).
A project may handle all changes without consulting the steering committee if the change does not impact budget, time or scope. If a change turns out to affect any of these parameters a SC decision must be taken. So, there are 2 types of changes and I am sitting here, not knowing how to present this in a format that shall be easy for PMs to ready and serve as a supportive document.
> believe myself to know what change management is about; the
> formal process for making changes to the project´s original scope.
Change = anything the customer want.
It could be new requirement (in some cases scope will not change), design change, technology change etc...
> A project may handle all changes without consulting the
> steering committee if the change does not impact budget, time
> or scope.
Any change will have impact in time (in some cases budget also)!!!! Additional work is required to be performed by one or more resource.
As per change request process, one has to analyze the change request and perform an impact analysis. Based on this, the stake holders has to decide if the change has to be implemented or not.
Best Regards,
Vivekanandan M Saving Changes...
Hans RobbersSenior Director| SalesforceVlissingen, Netherlands
Maria
Thanks for bringing up this interesting topic. Reading your story I do think there is something else what is causing issues.
A change is as you mention a change to the original scope of the project and whereby there might be an impact on the budget, timeline or quality, (suggest you also read the articles, the fangs of scope creep and Balancing TY 1&2 which deal with scope control)
So formally you need to bring each cr to the steering committee or project owner since there is a change in contract, even if there is no impact. In the future there might be a requirement not covered due to the change in scope and therefore approval is required.
In the real world you might agree as a working rule that all cr's with an impact less than 5% of the budget are subject to approval for the pm. During a regular steerco or a change meeting once a month the project sponsor can be briefed and final approval will be obtained.
So in reality there is only one cr
Something else you mention is there are 100+ systems all following there own cr procedure. I don't know how projects are organised in Tele2 however if these follow system boundaries cr's will be cross project boundaries and you need to send the cr's to systems/projects you have interdependencies with. This might also include the regulare maintenance departments.
Each of the related projects/systems/departments might return a zero impact to a cr. However they might also have to apply changesd which will impact their dependencies.
Fore this reason it is adviable to have a programme office or IT PMO to follo up on cross-boundary cr's
I will definately read those articles. And when I think, yes you are both right in the fact that any change actually should be brought to the SC.
I think I formulated my self wrong, all these systems I was mentioning are following the same process for change handling once approved by the project. Reading your articles and searching some more have given me some more insight. What my assigner is aiming at here, is probably to describe how the project actually should handle a change, when to consult SC, how to produce a impact analysis and eventually get the change approved or not.
Dave is mentioning the cross-boundary Cr:s, which is a reality that sometimes and from time to time projects fail in finding all affected systems and thus creating more or less emergency situations depending on what is beeing launched. Saving Changes...
Joe MooneySenior Technology Project Manager| Independent ConsultantOviedo, Fl, United States
Maria,
It sounds to me like your assigner is interested in understanding the workflow and the inherent analysis and decisions involved in the change request process. You might want to look into Business Process Management tools that facilitate the movement of documents/forms/requests through a process. I have favorites, but I don't want to turn this forum into product endorsements. Feel free to contact me directly if you'd like my opinions on some of these vendor tools. ([email protected]) Saving Changes...
"Nearly every great advance in science arises from a crisis in the old theory, through an endeavor to find a way out of the difficulties created. We must examine old ideas, old theories, although they belong to the past, for this is the only way to understand the importance of the new ones and the extent of their validity."
