Change Management Plan Management

Question: What is Change Management Plan? Explain. Answer: Changes to project scope can have a direct impact on the cost of the project and thus, it is one of the most crucial part of project. Thus, scope changes would be communicated to decision makers to obtain agreement and a formal process for change control would be deployed such that all necessary changes would be listed, their order of execution would be planned and everyone who would be affected would be communicated about the changes. To obtain approval, a change request form would be prepared containing details of project changes such as problem description, change description, justification, change category, and approval disposition. The change request form would go to a change review committee for the evaluation of changes. This committee would be formed out of people from different technical teams who would be selected on the basis of their capacity to understand the impact of changes. Changes that would be approved by this committee would be entered into a project plan. This project plan would be used by project manager who would assign responsibilities for each of the change decided and would communicate the same to respective team person. Project manager would be managing a change control process which would include management of change request forms, change review and evolution, change priority and classification and change approval. During the change control process, the change proposal would be validated and the impact of changes would be assessed by the project manager. After the project change is approved and decisions are made about changes to be done, the project manager would communicate to the team members about their individual responsibilities to carry out changes. The project manager would also report to the stakeholder by presenting all changes, their schedule and impacts on project. Change Control Management Process is created form four of its key components that are explained below: Change request forms: These forms identified all the changes to be made and confirms necessary details that are required for making decisions about them. A Change Request Form would have following details: Name and contact details of the originator of the change Date of submission Problem Description: As the Shanghai Port is 180 kms away from the China Plant of the company, additional logistics steps are required when any goods have to be shipped out of China. This requires transporting products from plant to Hangzhou port through truck, then loading them into container, then containers are loaded into barge that are shipped to Shanghai port where they are off-loaded again and then trucked to other area of port where they are loaded again on to ships. Description of the change: The facility of plant would be shifted from Hangzhou to Shanghai. Justification for the change: The steps involved in logistics can be reduced if the plant is shifted to Shanghai, location where more requirements are coming from, transportation costs from Hangzhou port to Shanghai port would not be needed and this would save huge costs to the company. Category of change: Relocation of plant to save on transportation costs. Impact of changes on project schedule and budget: Schedule of transportation would improve as the loading, truck transport, and offloading from Hangzhou port to Shanghai port would be eliminated. As the additional processes are currently incurring transportation and handling costs, their removal would also reduce costs and thus, budget would be reduced. Approval disposition Signature and date of Project Managers Date of Approval and signature of Project Sponsors Date of change updates in Change Request Log and project plan. Change review and evaluation: This reviews of changes would be done on the basis of certain factors : Skill requirement Impact of change on project schedule and project budget: The changes would be added to the existing project plan by the project manager to understand the impact of changes on project schedule and budget. The plan and work break down structure would be reviewed for assessment of impacts graphically. Risks on project changes Rework requirement Need for additional resources such as material, people, tools and technologies Change priority and classification: Changes decided would be categorized as per their priority of achievement which can be critical, high, medium or low. Changes that are critical to the success of project, are mandatory and need to be exercised within a week are given top priority. Changes that are important for the success of the project such as those affecting processes significantly, are given high priority. Changes that have significant impact on project but they do not directly support or hinder any processes, are categorized as Medium priority work. All other work are put into low priority. Change approval: A change review committee meet project managers, originator of change request and managers to discuss over the change plan for making decisions about them. Proposed changes would be analyze in the meeting with respect their impacts on project schedule and cost. If this impact goes out of the change control criteria, the change would be discarded or would be reconsidered. For instance, if the change affect the dates of deliveries significantly thereby consuming more time of staff then