Change Control Explained

Is your project plan irretrievably behind schedule??Are project costs turning out to be greater than the agreed budget??

Has your client asked for new scope??Or have you discovered you can't deliver what's already been promised?

Are the forecasted project benefits turning out to be work of fantasy??

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Don't worry it happens to everyone…. And here's how we fix it.

This article is about the change control process.?Simply put, change control is the process where you can get permission to alter the agreed dimensions of your project in some ways.?So, if you need to change the plan, budget, scope and so on - this is the process you need to follow.?

This is the part of the article where it starts to get tricky (that didn't take long, did it?) - you see the process for change control will vary greatly based on the complexity and maturity of your project environment.?You may need to just get an approval from your sponsor; or you may need to go to a Board; or you may need to go to several Boards.?Stick with me though, I'm going to give my advice which will help you no matter how complex the situation.

If your project has any level of control, someone besides the project manager will have signed up to its budget, timescales, scope, benefits, and quality.?There may be other things they've signed up to depending on the project, such as levels of risk, use of specific named resources or vendors.?The decision maker that's signed up to these things may be your project sponsor, or it could be a project board, or it could be a programme board, or an investment board.?It may be a combination of these potential decision makers.?Whoever it is - just for the purpose of this video - let's call them the decision makers for now - and accept there may be one or many of them.

Because the decision makers have signed up to those dimensions - the budget, timescales and so on - that means you can't change those dimensions without informing the decision makers and seeking their approval.?For this process to work, you really have to put yourself in their shoes.?They've signed up to the project, it's budget, it's scope and handed over the day to day running of it to you.?If they discover later on that you've delivered the project but it's a year late, or costs twice as much, or only delivers half of what was expected - they'll rightly determine that you've done a bad job, and possibly they will be judged to have done a bad job too.?So if those dimensions change - and over a long enough amount of time, some of them are likely to change - then you have to let them know.?Depending on your governance, you may have to notify them as soon as there's a realistic threat to those dimensions - keep that in mind.?Even if it's not in the rules, it's good practice to inform them.?

I'm going to talk though a scenario now that should help you to understand this.?Everything I'm about to share will be applicable for any of these dimensions changing - the scope, the costs, and so on.?But going forward, just for simplicity in explaining it, I'm just going to refer to the plan being late.?Okay, let's get into the details as you, the project manager, discover your project is behind schedule.

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Identification and Assessment

I would expect that before you do anything else, that you identify this problem as an issue and capture it with all the required detail in the issue log.?Do some basic analysis of it to judge how big of a problem it is.?In our example, it's a delay - let's say that a supplier you have a dependency on is going to be late handing over a product to you.?As a result, your project plan has shuffled to the right.?Start to look at how to resolve or minimise the issue.?Do what you can within the limits of your own authority, and then escalate if necessary.?

By this stage, you should let the Sponsor know what's going on - you really don't want to surprise them in a Steering Committee meeting with this information.?Keep them informed of the problem and what you're doing to resolve it.

Impacts

Whilst you're applying your actions to resolve the issue, start looking at the impact.?In this example, your project will deliver late.?That's certainly not good news, but how bad it is will be determined by the impact it has.?Does this delay mean that some critical product, tool or process will be late getting into the organisations hands??Is that an inconvenience, or is it catastrophic??Does it mean higher profitability will be delayed, or does it mean your organisation will be in violation of the law?

Then consider the other impacts.??Usually a longer project will come at greater cost - so not only is the dimension of the plan out, but now your budget may be as well.

?A delay also means resources are held up on your project for longer, which is most likely what's driving up those costs - but their lack of availability may delay other projects in the portfolio.

By managing the issue, you are trying to reduce all of these impacts as much as you can - but you may only get so far before you need to change some of the projects agreed dimensions.

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Change

For example, you may be able to still deliver on time if you increase the resources on the later stages of the project.?That additional cost and allocation of resources needs to be approved by your decision maker.

Or, you may be able to remove some of the scope of the project so that only the most critical parts are delivered - which would allow the project to complete on time.?As you would be delivering less than the decision makers had signed up to - you need to get them to approve this new scope.

Or, it could just be that the project schedule has to be changed to reflect the delay and you need the decision makers to approve your new schedule.

With that in mind, you should now have a change you want to recommend to the decision makers

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But we're not done yet…all we've succeeded in doing is identifying the problem, capturing the details, communicated that there's a problem, done everything you can to resolve it, and now identified the impacts of changing the dimensions of your project beyond what's been agreed.?That's a lot, but we have more to do.?

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Approval

You will need capture all of these details in a change request document.?Your organisation may have a standard one for use, but if not there are plenty of templates available online.

The template will encourage you to capture all of the detail you possibly can about the change you are asking to make.?It?covers the details of the issue, the cause, the recommendation you're making to redimension the project and it's impacts.?You need to take that change request to the decision makers, and use it to inform them of the change that you are asking for approval of.

Whether that's just your sponsor, a project board, or whatever governance forum - they will have questions.

Just because I'm talking about it in a relaxed manner, don't assume that this is trivial.?You're going to have to tell some senior people that things haven't worked out the way they were intended, and that's going to draw scrutiny.?They may have hard questions about why this happened, whether initial estimations were flawed and why; or whether things have changed and why.?I'm not telling you this to scare you, I'm telling you to prepare you.

They may not be blaming you, but it can be an uncomfortable conversation - so make sure to drill yourself on everything they can potentially ask you - such as the cause, the recommendations, the implications, and possibly on how to continuously improve so that these problems can be avoided in future.?

Keep in mind, part of the reason they are asking these questions is they may have to face similar questions from their bosses - they may have to justify why they've given you more time, more money.?They need to be able to maintain the confidence of their bosses and peers, in just the same way that you do.?So face the questions with preparation and confidence, give sufficiently detailed explanations, provide supporting information if needed, and - most importantly - be honest.?If you got something wrong, then be honest and explain why you got it wrong.

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Complex Programmes

In most cases, what we've just discussed is sufficient to get a change request approved and complete in most change control processes - there is more though, so don't disappear.?

There are some programmes and portfolios that have such detailed interdependencies and complexity that additional steps are required in the process.

An example is if your change request is impacting the technologies used in your organisation, you may need to share the details with a technical design authority first - especially if the change relates to the scope or quality of the outputs.?Another is that change control itself may have a dedicated governance forum - I remember going for an interview with a bank that was starting up a programme to deliver compliance after Brexit and they'd established a change control function that had to have dedicated resources managing it to ensure the programme delivered properly.?So if you work in such a complex environment, take a moment to see if your change request has to be approved by anyone else.?It's not unusual for these requests to require multiple approvals - and the sequence of those approvals is something you need to be aware of before you start sending change request forms around the business.

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Closing

Okay, you've got your change request approved and you've nearly completed the change control process.?After notifying other impacted parties that the request was approved, your next step is to rebaseline the impacted project documents.?In the case of our example, this would mean that your project plan gets updated with new dates, and possibly some other documents that feature key dates will need to be updated.?Apply version control to the document, but (pro tip!) in the plan, make sure to include a note against each impacted milestone that it had been changed by the Change Request and it's unique ID.?Update the summary of your issue and close it.?And when you write your next status report, instead of seeing Red everywhere you can change it back to Green.?

For now at least.?

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I'm Stuart Taylor, and I make content about project management - if that's your thing, make sure to connect with me.