By David A. Peck, PMP

Managing change, within the Scope of Work, is critical to the successful completion of a project, for change management controls both internally generated changes and customer-driven changes.

Most companies establish processes and procedures to control all project changes. For instance, they require customer-driven changes to be submitted to the project manager.

Each change should be reviewed based on the following criteria:

• What is the cost of the change?
• What is the impact to the project if this change is implemented?
• What added value does the company receive if this change is implemented?
• What other projects are impacted with this change?

Remember that change management is a continuous process. Your project will evaluate many changes throughout its life. Each time change is needed, these questions should be considered.

The changes themselves will be influenced by four factors:

• Management Commitment
• Organizational Policy
• Organizational Procedures
• Organizational Audit

Management commitment will support and approve all change management processes, policies, and procedures. A post-project audit of these changes should be conducted at a key-learning's session held between the project manager and the sponsor. Management should empower and support the change control process. Once the change management policies and procedures are adapted in your organization, they should become part of your standard operating procedures. Implementation of these policies and procedures will create some organizational challenges. Change is not easy to adapt within any organization.

Your employees will transition as the change management policies and procedures are implemented. It is unique that management must understand this transition and deal with change issues as they arise. In conducting a large application development project, I found the following user views when a change management standard was adapted.

1. All changes are needed to run my business.
2. Maybe we need to review all changes before they are approved.
3. All changes will be approved and funded.

The transition and implementation of change management will take time. As you can see from the three statements listed above, all changes are needed to run your business, but they must be reviewed for impact on the project deliverable, project deadline and scope of the project. If a change is submitted more than once during the life of a project, the project manager should look for the root cause of the change. Different employees often use data in different ways. This is a sign that the business requirements are not correctly stated for all users. Getting to the root cause of a change will help deliver your project with the right functionality.

Organizations can expect to deliver projects within a controlled scope. All business changes will be funded and approved within the guidelines of your organizations. Project managers will understand how to implement and control changes. Projects will be delivered on time and users will be educated about the impact of requesting a change.

Change is not easy to adapt within any organization. The implementation of policies and procedures are bound to create some organizational challenges such as business conflicts, organizational ownership issues, and controlled implementations. To overcome these challenges, each organization must adapt policies and enforce these policies when the tough decisions and user demands occur. If these steps are taken, organizations can expect project deliveries to improve and users to be satisfied with the project deliverables.