Application Project Manager

Effective management of change is essential to delivering a successful project and avoiding the problems of scope creep or uncontrolled project changes. Those problems manifest themselves as significant changes to project scope and therefore to the plan and expected benefits or too many uncontrolled changes to the design of the solution impacting the project schedule.

Managing Change

Change to a project is not a bad thing and indeed may be necessary but it must be controlled change. Managing change must be via an established project change process so that everyone is aware of how changes are made and who approves them. This is true whether the change is expected and managed as part of a project management iterative process or whether it is managing change as part of a waterfall process.

Change Control Board or Project Board

Typically a project will establish a change control board composed of those people who are empowered by the business and project to make two types of decisions about project changes that involve:

1. Project scope, objectives and expected benefits. These changes may involve additional money, resource or re-planning and any changes at this level should be carefully considered as there is usually a significant project impact
2. Detailed solution design changes. These changes typically do not affect scope and usually involve refining or clarifying requirements and their expression in the solution. The decisions for this type of change may be delegated to detailed experts or those experts may make recommendations for change to the Change Control Board

Management of Change

Management of change at the project scope level often involves re-planning and any changes should cascade to any supporting documents such as the Project Plan. Management of change at the software level should be via a software configuration management database. Configuration management is about making changes to the software configuration items and then delivering those changes to the software test or production environment in a controlled manner. Configuration management is one of the disciplines of IT Service Management and part of the ITIL framework. Importantly, some of the disciplines associated with IT Service Management are applicable to project management and should be used where they are effective and save the project from reinventing the wheel.

Change Management Plan

Managing change within a project will share many similarities to managing change in IT services and consequently it makes sense to reuse these good practices and change management processes wherever possible. For example an existing change management plan may define processes and procedures that could be reused by the project and if appropriate that opportunity should be exploited. Sometimes that reuse will not be appropriate because of the number of specific differences needed, in that case simply reuse the appropriate parts of change management for managing change in the project.

Managing change effectively is another important component of a successful project.

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