What Is Included in a Change Management Process
Many projects have encountered serious difficulties because a formal change management process was not established and enforced. Without a doubt, change management is one of your key responsibilities as the project manager. Even a one-line change could be extremely significant. That is why you always need to be careful when managing change.
Given the importance of change management, you, as the project manager, must ensure that the process for managing changes is clearly documented and understood by all project stakeholders, suppliers, and the IBM delivery team. This process must then be strictly enforced whenever the need for a change occurs.
Change management includes a:
You must identify what baselines you will control, at what level of detail, how, and by whom. Each change to any of these baselines should be documented and follow the defined change management process. Many projects use a CCB for accepting, rejecting, or deferring change requests. The powers and responsibilities of a CCB should be well defined and agreed upon by key stakeholders and included in the change management plan. On some large, complex projects, multiple CCBs might have different responsibilities.
Establishing and enforcing a formal change management process is key to project success.
Three WWPMM work product descriptions and templates exist to assist you in creating the change log, change order, and change request. An additional source of help is the WWPMM work pattern, HE5, Handle Change Request, in the Handling Exceptions work pattern group. This resource can be found, together with descriptions and templates for all WWPMM work products, at the WWPMM Web site.