Assessing the impact of a proposed change, and sorting good from bad
The Situation
We were engaged to support a multi-year, multi-site, multi-million pound, multi-project construction programme. The detailed design of later phases was left open to accommodate changing business needs. As a result, the programme encountered many requests for enhancements to the original concept design: some of them useful; many more of them much less useful.
The Objective
We were tasked with implementing a process to capture project change requests, and to ensure that only appropriate requests were implemented, without holding up project delivery unnecessarily.
The Approach
Working closely with stakeholders, we:
- Devised a set of change control principles and process in liaison with stakeholders (essentially an approved change request was required for changes likely to cause unfavourable cost or time impacts, but not for changes likely to have a beneficial impact).
- Created a Change Register (in MS SharePoint®) to document the progress of requests through the process and their cumulative impact.
- Held regular reviews of the Change Register, first to sense-check new requests for “reasonableness” before spending time and effort on evaluating impact, and then to approve or reject open change requests to minimise any delays.
The Outcome
- Using this approach, about a third of ~300 requests were rejected, representing ~£4m of inappropriate change
- Thus we enabled the programme to control its costs and delivery without compromising quality or timescales.
