Professional change management

According to statistics, the average IT project for the month is growing changes by 5%. It is easy to calculate that in six months the project changes by almost a third, and in a year the project becomes more than half. Moreover, one of the main reasons for unsuccessful IT projects is the uncontrolled flow of changes leading to the failure of the project. I propose to use a systematic approach to managing change.

Change Management Procedure

First, we will talk about the general scheme of change management. In the following parts, aspects of change management will be described in more detail and how to adapt this procedure to various changes (see the content at the bottom of the article).



For comparison, in most projects it looks like this:

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1. Request for change

The initiator makes a request that goes beyond the scope of the project and is a change. This is not a signal for action, but for now only a request.

2. Fixing a request in the registry of changes

Any change requests should be recorded in the special document “Change Request Register” (or Change Register), which contains a list of all change requests.
This process will be discussed in more detail in part 2.

3. Analysis of change

This process allows you to understand how the proposed change will affect the project. Also at the analysis stage, an assessment is made of the consequences of what will happen if the change is accepted and what the project will lose if it is rejected.
This process will be discussed in more detail in part 2.

4. Negotiations

As a rule, one of the parties insists on amending the draft, while the other opposes it. Therefore, it is necessary to negotiate, discuss options for implementing and rejecting the proposed change and decide on it.
This process will be discussed in more detail in part 2.

5. Decision

Based on the discussion of the proposed change, one of three decisions should be made:
- To accept
- reject
- Postpone.

6. Making changes to the plan

1) Make changes to the base plan (the original project plan), since initially the project was planned according to one scenario, and now this scenario has changed.
2) In the work plan, which should be your project navigator.

7. Performance of work

Since the change is made to the plan, it is part of the project. We work with him as with the usual tasks of the project.
Everything is simple here. Need to perform work.

8. Verification of results

And pass for review.
If the work is accepted, then the work on the implementation of changes are considered completed.