97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know

Chapter 78. Every Project Manager Is a Contract Administrator

PMP. Fabio Teixeira de Melo

AS THE PROJECT MANAGER, you are responsible for change control. You put together a process for documenting requests and performing the changes. But how can you control changes when you are not aware that they happened?

The client's team members will have direct contact with their peers in your team. Trying to satisfy the client, or being unaware of contractual obligations, a team member can agree to an extra training session, or even implement a change to the software, and forget to inform you—or alert you when it is too late. Some of those changes may be innocuous, but others could bring problems. For instance, silently altering part of the software features means the change may remain unmentioned in the software manual. This could lead to rewrites, reprinting, etc., with all the associated (an unbilled) time and cost.

One might feel tempted to prohibit interaction between members of the client's and the contractor's project teams, but that can jeopardize communication. Contracts don't cover whether or not the client has the right to talk to your team members. And how can a project manager control whether the team members and the client are in contact?

To avoid undocumented changes being performed, every team member should be familiar with the contract, including aspects of scope, time, and each ...