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Change Management |
First published April 08 |
Manoj Deshmukh
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Change Management and dealing with changes is a key project management function for any industry. There might be enormous variance in efforts, cost, schedule, quality of deliverables if changes are not handled effectively. Many projects are delayed and many other are closed (terminated) because project managers were not able to manage changes.
Change management and dealing of with scope or requirements change is an importance function of project managers. However clear the requirements are, whatever the tool used for documenting requirements ( right from Rational tools to Word document ) and whatever the category of execution model ( Pure Waterfall to evolutionary prototype ) requirements are bound to change. The only difference to change is to what extent, and what is the impact on project success or failure. Having said this successful execution of any project relies on how good and effective is your change management mechanism.
This is the reason why Monitoring and Controlling Process Group ( Section 3.2.4 of PMP handbook ) is such an important section.
There are a number of reasons for change in requirements and these reasons depend on multiple factors like:
But whatever the reasons, the result is the same “Customer Dissatisfaction” or “Project Failure” in terms of:
Although there can be number of other reasons this paper will limit its scope to IT projects (more inclined to product implementations to meet customer needs )
Considering this scope I will consider few major reasons of requirement changes:
Customers who are mostly moving from a manual system to a digital systems (Example: Product Life Cycle Management ( or Product Data Management ) systems like MatrixOne from Dassault Systems or TeamCenter Engineering from Siemens or PDMLink from PTC) .
These customers normally fail to understand that their entire process cannot be replicated in the new systems. If you are developing new inbuilt system for your own business transactions then you can fine tune the system as per your requirements. But if you are using some product for your business process mappings there are few critical decisions they have to take to define a solution. Customers have to
These customers sometimes fail to map their requirements. Some customers we have seen instruct System Integrators (SI’s) / development team to exactly replicate the manual system without understanding the benefits of new system. Such projects are a nightmare for project managers as requirements keep on changing slowly as they realize these issues at a later stage of execution. Issues such as:
We need to be extra cautious to deal with such categories of customers and some of the steps to avoid such problems can be:
These set of customers are those who have already gone through one cycle of digital systems and know the benefits of new systems. Also they understand possible hurdles for these projects. Few of them understand the importance of requirements and its documentation but feel that with the knowledge they have on past systems they can cut short the requirements phase to save efforts or cost. They fail to realize that each implementation is new and goes through a number of iterations / phases. Some examples are customers moving from in house system or legacy systems ( like Mainframe ) to some new system like PLM or ERP system ( like SAP or Oracle Manufacturing).
There can be substantial scope for change in requirements for such customers because:
Below are possible problems faced by implementers. Unfortunately for most of them, they themselves are responsible
Some of the issues related to change management are because of geography or language barriers:
We can achieve better Scope management by following some basic steps.
Change Request Workflow
Internal Changes
These are the changes not suggested by the customer and may or may not need customer acceptance but they are required because of some new methodology or approach.
For example while estimating efforts we have not considered usage of tool like productivity improvement tools or technical tools for data migration or upgrade. These tools might have reduced efforts on the project but they should be tracked to ensure proper control of the projects.
External Changes
These are the changes which a good project manager would normally track if there is an impact on effort or schedule. But track the changes even if there is no change in effort or schedule or even there is positive impact on efforts (Efforts Savings)
Categorize the changes as:
There will certainly be a few additional steps based on the nature of engagement and the type of customer. If we take care of these basic steps we can avoid some of the impact of “Requirement Changes”. It is though a herculean task to avoid changes in products or systems even if the scope is frozen before the start of the development phase.
Change Management plays a key role in the success of a project. All Project Managers should have a definite strategy for handling changes before initiating any project. Effective Change Management methodology can keep scope, efforts, cost and quality under control
Manoj Deshmukh has engaged in the management of several offshore and onshore projects as a Project / Delivery Manager/ Delivery Head. Manoj is a PMP certified Project Manager with around 15 years of experience in Engineering and Project Management. He has managed many projects / programs across the globe in US, UK, Europe, APAC. He has managed a number of different project types including Product Development / Services, T & M / Fixed Price.
He is BE (Mech), Post Graduate Diploma in Business Management, Post Graduate Diploma in Software Engineering and has extensive experience in the Automotive domain and IT.
The authors email address is Manoj.Deshmukh@geometricglobal.com
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