Get an excellent grip on change management in your projects
A project with a solid change management process in place has fairer chance of achieving its set goals when compared to one going on with no well-set change control process or practices. Every project is bound to go through changes – may it be small or big. Many project managers tend to replan the project whenever changes happen and move forward. Smaller changes are never even documented. Going on this way, the project managers most of the time eventually land in a situation where they can't justify the piled up project cost and delays at a far advanced point, when a root cause analysis will be far out of question.
An effective change management and change control system can help the project managers to take better decisions, accept or reject changes, analyze the impact of it and maintain proper documentation through change logs. Plan First does it all..
Keep a tab on the changes
Plan First allows you to log all the change requests of your project and update its status and priority. Apart from the set ones, you will also be able to add more fields if required. Based on the priorities and status set, a project manager will be able to take a better decision on a larger scheme of things. With this mighty tool in hand, a PM will be able to see how quickly the small changes add up and what impact these can have on the overall project health.
Approval Process
While larger projects need to have a change control board and change control process, medium level projects can be handled with lighter processes. However, in both cases, it needs approval. Ideally, an approver will request documentation on the impact (impact analysis) before approving the change. If there is no dedicated team for change control, project manager himself takes up this role and formally approves the changes in the system. At any later stage, the reports on change logs can be rolled out by the approver or reviewer.
Impact Analysis
Anything that impacts the project's cost, schedule, quality or scope needed to be measured. As you know as a common rule of thumb, something that is not rightly measured is extremely difficult to control or improve.
Before approving a project, a detailed report on the scope, cost, schedule and quality needed to be prepared. All supporting documents should be uploaded to the project document repository. An impact summary will help the approvers and the project managers to take well-informed decisions.
Reports
Various reports on changes are available at one-click in the system. The comparison on actual vs. estimated cost and expenditure analysis will give a high-level overview on the health of change requests. Many other reports are also available in the system as well such as the charts based on status or priority.
