Managing big changes within your project - a 3 step guide

As a project manager, you spend an awful lot of time using those project management skills to create plans and establish objectives for your team. As the project progresses you spend a lot of time making changes, whether these are at the request of the sponsors, stakeholders or even team members as they work through the project and discover issues that need dealing with.

Changes are inevitable so it is important to accept that they do happen, how you deal with them and manage any issues that come up during the project are where the challenges lie. This will allow you to be the best project manager that you can be. Parallel Project Training have put together a simple 3 step guide to managing those big changes.

Receive a request for changes

The first part of any big change is being notified that there is a need for a change in the project, this can come in a number of different ways. It might be through a meeting, email or on the phone. In an ideal world, it will be on a change request form, but this doesn’t happen as often as it should. Once you have all the details regarding this proposed change then it is a good idea to ensure you have all the details and nothing has been overlooked. Checking things over is good practice to follow and can save you making more changes later down the line.

You will then need to assess the request in terms of schedule, work that has been done and work to be done, budget, and resources that are available. Remember that if a job is estimated to take 5 days it may not just add 5 days to the schedule as it will push other tasks out of schedule as well. So you will need to assess the full length of time it may add to the schedule and how it fits into the workload.

Prepare and present

Once you have a full understanding of the impact of the change that has been requested you will be able to prepare new timescales and work structures together with details of any additional costs and present your recommendations.

In some cases, the possible benefits of the change may be seen to be not worth it. They may not end up being implemented because the changes that are requested

Receive a decision

If the proposed changes are small and fall in an amount you are able to authorise then there should be no problem going ahead with them. If they are larger changes that you will need to get them approved by the sponsors of the full project team – it is likely that the terms for this type of change will have been set out at the beginning of the project.

The decision to make the changes will then either be authorised or denied depending on how important the impact will be to the project, cost and any other factors that are taken into consideration.