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What is a change request?
A change request is a formal proposal to modify any document, any deliverable or any baselined item (that could include your project management plan, your scope statement for example). The most common of these documents are related to the Scope, Schedule or Cost of the project. For example, are we changing the the dollars involved? Are we changing the time involved? Or are we changing the Scope that we’re delivering in our project. All of these will need a formal change request once a document or an item is baselined.
Any project stakeholder may request a change. Change requests are processed for review and disposition through the change control process, and change requests can be initiated from inside or outside the project. They can be optional or they can be legally or contractually mandated. Perhaps a legal change has happened and that requires a change that needs to go through the formal change request process, so that we’re going getting the appropriate approvals to change either the scope, the schedule or the cost. We want everyone to be across this change, we don’t want to just be changing the schedule on an ad-hoc basis otherwise people are going to get upset. We do this often times when issues, gaps or problems are found while the project work is being performed. A change request can be submitted to modify things like our project policies or procedures – maybe we need to do things in a different way – the project or product scope as we said, the cost or the budget which we’ve touched on as well. There’s the schedule or the time, if something is going to be delivered in June but all of a sudden according to our analysis it’s going to be delivered in September and maybe that’s going to affect the cost because we need more resources, then people need to know about this through the appropriate methodologies and the appropriate process, which is this change management process.
The quality of the project or the project results – if that’s going to vary significantly then perhaps we need to raise a change request as well. Maybe something simply is not possible to do, or maybe we’ve found a better way to do something and we just need to to put that into our scope so that everybody is aware. For this reason, change requests might include:
- Corrective action where we’re bringing a project back on track. For example we’re aligning the project activities to something that we’ve found.
- Preventative action – maybe we’re preventing future performance from going off-track, for example we see the schedule coming up in September instead of June, and that’s something that we want to bring back on track. Maybe we want to crash the project resources, where you add a lot of resources and money and cost and that’s going to bring it back into June so that we can get it done. Maybe we need to fast-track the schedule, which is doing everything in parallel instead of doing everything one after the other, and that will get it all done in time.
- Defect repair – as we’re going through our quality control, maybe we’re doing our test plan and testing the item and that comes up with a defect, but that actually changes the scope of the project. So it relates to scope again, we need to make a change and we need to make a formal change through our change management and change request system.
Of course we could have just general updates to our project, where maybe a customer has found that they don’t like something and we need to change that. Or maybe the situation has changed where they don’t need it until September and we can actually physically change that project schedule. All of this is completely up to you as the project manager, and usually you’ll be working with the project sponsor and the people involved who you’re delivering this project for, and the team that you’re delivering with.
The change management plan is what describes the process for these change requests. How do how do you raise a change request, for example? And what do you need to do? Who does it go to? Does it go to the project manager, then to the project sponsor? Does it need to go to a steering committee? What is the approval process of these change requests?
If we’re involving more money, and it needs to come from the project sponsor or a governing body then that needs to be approved by those people. This process can just be a few lines in your project management plan, noted as a change management process. Or it can be a complete document outlining the process. A lot of this depends a lot on the environmental factors – the enterprise environmental factors which you’ll see in almost every PMBOK guide process. That just relates to how a company works and how it operates on a day to day basis. All that will affect how you raise a change request, and what you put in your change management plan. And that is the process and the idea behind Change Requests.
– David McLachlan