Your Project Management Coach: Best Practices for Managing Projects in the Real World

Chapter 11

Setting Up a Change Management Plan

In the good old days, you could race up to your airplane gate at the last minute, your suitcase weighted with clothes and personal products like shampoo and nail files. Over time, airport security added rules to keep us safe: what you can bring on board, the quantity and how it's packaged, and how long before the flight you can check your bag. Now, you spend hours longer than you used to and spend more on luggage fees. And what was once a simple, straightforward goal is now a complicated burden.

Change requests for a project are a lot like that. As the requests come in, they seem to make sense and seem doable. But then, at some point, you find your schedule longer, your costs higher, and your objectives almost impossible to achieve.

However, change is a fact of life. You can't say no to every change that's requested. Someone forgot a requirement that's important to your project. Or a team member comes up with a new design that makes the final product easier to use. If changes make sense, you want them to become part of your project. At the same time, you don't want the project overwhelmed with changes that aren't of value.

You don't know everything you need to know at the beginning of a project. A change management process accommodates that reality. It helps you include the changes you want and block the ones that don't make sense. It provides a way for people to submit change requests. Team members evaluate the requests and a change ...