Project Change

Change management is one of the key components and knowledge areas in project management, the reason behind that relates to the fact every project will require a change during its phases, regardless of its complexity, size, scope or cost. Change is essential and if not handled properly could lead to scope creep, budget overrun, or project failure. From my point of view proper understanding of the change, is the key to managing project change.

Every change has an initiator, this could be a business user due to new functionality required, or fixing a major functionality bug, as well the initiator could be developer, due to discovered bugs. As well each change could come along with disadvantages, in other words, the intention could be to fix a bug, however, the implemented fix could affect performance, or affect the project critical path. Change initiator considers only one direction of the change, and project manager, or project sponsor usually consider the consequences. If the implications of the change are not properly understood and communicated, most probably changes would be resisted, canceled or improperly handled. Other reasons made me consider understating the change as the key to managing changes in projects; those are change implications on staffing, it is important to understand change implication because changes could require new expertise in-house, or outsourced to plan, design or execute the change. As well understanding the change could help in finding alternatives that could be more cost effective and requires less time to perform. Change initiator should ensure that all change requirements; implications, advantages and disadvantages are properly addresses, analyzed and communicated. This will increase potential of buy in from project manager and project sponsor who eventually approve and have power to approve changes. Ward & Elvin suggest building a change framework that is based on understanding the nature of the change to increase the chance of successful outcome (Ward & Elvin, 1999). Sometimes changes are driven by strategic objectives of an organization, this implies that short term benefits would not be visible to project team, and this could result in discarding the change, while understanding that this changes was initiated for a long term benefit for the organization would help project team understand the actual value of the change an act based on that.

Changes are required and occur in every project, failing to control them could lead to project failure, I believe the key to managing project changes is understanding change nature, implications and requirements to better analyze its impact on the project and the organization.

Reference:

Legris, P, & Collerette, P 2006, 'A ROADMAP FOR IT PROJECT IMPLEMENTATION: INTEGRATING STAKEHOLDERS AND CHANGE MANAGEMENT ISSUES', Project Management Journal, 37, 5, pp. 64-75, Business Source Premier, EBSCOhost, viewed 16 June 2012

Ward, J, & Elvin, R 1999, 'A new framework for managing IT-enabled business change', Information Systems Journal, 9, 3, pp. 197-221, Business Source Premier, EBSCOhost, viewed 16 June 2012