The project management change control process is a systematic method that employees and team members employ to bring major changes to an already approved project. It comprises various steps like adjustments in budget, goals, and deadlines, and recruiting new employees over time as the project evolves. However, project change control makes sure that various stakeholders are on the same page. Today, we’ll discuss project management change control process examples; change control process in project management, the various steps involved, and the PM role in CM.
What is Change Control Process in Project Management?
The change control process in project management is a method of helping in receiving, monitoring, analyzing, and resolving the change request. Often, you would see the whole change control process with a step-by-step guide in the form of a flow chart. Companies develop a process to manage various structural changes. However, it makes sure that the project would keep on moving forward no matter what happens, and it doesn’t leave anyone out of the loop.
Change Control Process – Steps
Before discussing project management change control process examples; it is significant to discuss some of the main steps in the change control process. They are as follows;
Developing a System
Here, you briefly describe what change is without sending it through the requesting stage. For this purpose, you need to include an additional step and it won’t affect your schedule and won’t demand any extra step of sending the change request. It also won’t impact the pre-decided deadline, ad the change control process comprises request submission, approval, and updated.
Establishing Procedures
You should choose a change leader for the project change control process to share information with all the employees, communicate with various stakeholders, and supervise the progress of the project. They would come up with automatic responses for the change request in order to keep things moving forward. It is significant to mention in the analysis how the potential changes would impact the team member, the company’s budget, customers, timeline, stakeholders, and risks.
Predicting the Impact of Change
You should employ a flow chart to describe the areas that the change request would affect like budgeting, quality, resources, or schedule. It is important to define the changes and answer the questions that you and your team members would have; don’t forget to measure the effect of employing metrics.
For instance, if the proposed changes impact the budget, then you should discuss how much money you would earn and lose in case of approval of changes.
Project Tasks Listing
If you haven’t created the list for the project tasks, then now is the perfect time to do so. You should analyze the change request against the project task list to check whether it has any conflicts or not. If you find any overlaps, then it needs adjustment or removal on your current workload if the changes go through smoothly.
Drafting Template
If you have created a template for the project change control process, then it would save you time while communicating at every new step. It also guides other team members to follow the procedures and policies consistently if different people are managing the project.
Project Management Role in Change Management
The project management organization plays a significant role in the change control process, and it performs the following steps;
- Defining the process
- Offering various tools and templates
- Implementing the change control cycle
- Offering reviews independently
- Supporting and facilitating the change board meeting
- Maintaining a proper record of change requests
- Making sure that the communication is flowing among various stakeholders
- Ensuring that the updated plan properly reflects the changes
Project Management Change Control Process Examples
Some of the main examples of project management change control processes examples are as follows;
Software Development
A software development company is working on the project of establishing an e-commerce platform. The project team recognizes some errors that could potentially jeopardize the performance of the platform during the testing phase. However, the team maintains a log of errors and defects as a change request, analyzes the effect of change, and finds out the feasibility and effects of resolving the errors.
After analyzing the change requests, the team would approve the changes, document every move, and execute the changes in the controlled setting. After meeting the pre-decided criteria, the team would launch testing and verification protocol to make sure that the execution has gone through successfully.
Construction Project
A construction company is working on the project of building an office. The architect and the designer send a change request to the construction team; they want some improvements in the building like an extra floor. The team would maintain a log of the change request, analyzes the impact of the change, and find out the feasibility of the proposed changes.
After analyzing the change request, the construction project team declined the change request, because it would greatly impact the budget, schedule and deadline, and project scope. The team would document its final and discuss it with the other stakeholders and the architecture.
Launching New System
A company is introducing a new CRM (customer relation management) system in order to increase its sales and offer better customer service. While executing the system, the sales team sends a change request of including some additional features in the CRM system that would allow the sales team to track orders in real time. The project team would record the change request, and conduct the impact and feasibility analysis
After analyzing the change request, the project team approves the request for additional features and allows it to execute it in the controlled setting. After testing and verification, the team makes sure that it has implemented the changes successfully in order to meet its criteria.
Conclusion: Project Management Change Control Process Examples
After an in-depth study of project management change control process examples; we have realized that change control in project management is a system process. If you learning about the project change control process, then you should keep in mind the abovementioned examples.
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