The Hidden Cost of Change Control

When a project is hurried through requirements, defects are found, or the landscape changes around the project, a request is made to change the original requirements. This process in most projects is referred to as ‘Change Control’.

In most situations the focus of the Change Control process is to analyze the impact of a requirement change on your triple constraint (scope, schedule, budget) and gain the necessary approval to move forward with the requirement change.  What often goes unnoticed is the hidden cost the process of change control can bring to your project if not well managed.

What is change control?

According to the PMBOK, Perform Integrated Change Control is the process of reviewing all change requests, approving changes, and managing changes to the deliverables, organizational process assets, project documents, and the project management plan. While this is a commonly accepted definition, the actual process that each organization adopts can vary.

Most organizations adopt a ‘Change Control Form’ as an artifact that would ask the submitter to detail the change requested along with rationale. At this point the project manager will usually provide this to another member of the project team who holds the subject matter expertise necessary to analyze the impact of the change. The subject matter expert will analyze the impact of the change and create an estimate to be reviewed and subsequently approved or declined by a change control board. In the event that the change control is approved, the project scope, schedule, and budget could be rebaselined to reflect the impact of the change.

Hidden Cost

The hidden cost of change control that I have witnessed/felt is not the impact of the change (that is accounted for in the new baseline).  It is the actual process of fielding the change control.  Each change control submitted creates a tax on the project by utilizing the resources that should be dedicated to the execution of project tasks. As a project manager it is within the scope of your role to be fielding and managing change requests, but for your project team resources this work is unaccounted for and often above and beyond what had originally been committed. In turn, the time that they dedicate to the analysis of a change request will either over-commit a resource for a period of time, interfere with other upcoming project deadlines, or both.  What compounds this issue is when in the project lifecycle the change comes.  What I have found is that the later you get into a project schedule, the more likely it will take a lengthy analysis.

While this chart is based mostly on anecdotal feedback from key resources over my last few projects, it highlights the increased resource impact of a change request as a project progresses. The further you get into a project, the more likely you are going to encounter rework to accommodate a change. The analysis of that rework and interdependencies are significant.  Depending on how your organization tracks project time and cost, you could be incurring a significant project cost that was not included in your estimation.

Recommendations:

1. During the Planning Process of your project, work with your analysts to evaluate the quality of your requirements, the likelihood of a change in business requirements, along with organizations familiarity with the technology and add to the resources estimation an appropriate allocation related to likely change control activities. While this could look/feel like sandbagging, PMBOK clearly states that you need to take into account Enterprise Environmental Factors when executing the estimation process.  
2. Establish strong entrance criteria into the change control process. Identify an accountable executive up front who can dismiss change control requests up front based on business justification. This will reduce the amount of time that your subject matter experts will spend analyzing change controls that would never be approved in the first place.

No matter what level of planning and requirements gathering is performed, you will always have changes that need to be made. I hope that these tips help better plan for those changes in the future.