Perform Integrated Change Control#
A project exists to address the change. Project Management is influenced heavily by change management. It is almost impossible to complete a project successfully without taking a change request. But if you do not control the changes in a systematic way, then you will never to able to complete the project successfully. So at the heart of project management lies an art and science of managing and negotiating changes. PMBOK centralizes all the change requests through this process. Make as simple or as complicated your change request process as is the need of the project but there is only one channel through which any change can be handled and that is this process called “Perform Integrated Change Control’. Define your change management processes clearly, communicate and educate all the stakeholders and especially the project team that how we handle changes to the approved work.
In the industries generally change request is consider an increase of scope. But PMBOK gives a very broad meaning to this term. If you cannot deliver a project successfully by following your approved project plan then whatever deviation you take is part of the change. Change requests need to be looked at from two perspectives A- what is changing B-what is impacting. What is changing can be a process, training need, scope, availability of people, funds or time, etc. What is impacting can be quality, functionality, performance, need for more funds, or time. Therefore before you can a decision to work on a change or not you must know what is changing and what is the impact of the change.
Every change request may not lead to a change in baseline or change of some document. Change may be as settle as we want to change our work culture so define a set of values and follow those from tomorrow morning. Change may be as gross as some work need to be re-done tomorrow because the customer changed his mind. Great project managers always work with threshold limits so to approve every change they need not go to management. Many times they themselves make the decision to implement the change and absorb the impact from the change budget. The beauty of great project management work is to address all the changes within the approved change budget.
The process of reviewing all change requests, approving changes, and managing changes to the deliverables, organizational process assets, project documents, project management plan, and communicating their disposition is perform integrated change control.
This process deals with influencing the factors that circumvent change requests and ensure only approved changes are implemented. The responsibility of this process also includes documenting approved changes, maintaining the integrity of baselines, coordinating changes across the entire project, and documenting the complete impact of a change request.
Perform Integrated Change Control (Process Summary)#
This table is based on PMBOK 6th Edition of PMI
Inputs#
- Change Requests
- Enterprise Environmental Factors
- Organizational Process Assets
- Project Documents
- Project Management Plan
- Work Performance Reports
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