Is Change Management Worth It?

So, do you think that you and your team(s) do a good job with change management?  Do you feel it is even important?  Are there some changes you think are so small that you just go ahead and do them and don’t worry about it?

The truth is, there is no small change and they must all be documented.  There was what was called a “glitch” in the first Mars lander that created a 1 second delay and made the lander computer think it had already landed when in fact it was 3.7Km high in the atmosphere still and fell the rest of the way.  One damn second!  The rumor is that this is because some of the calculations were completed using English measurements and some were completed using the metric system.  Yet, years of work and millions of dollars were lost to this “glitch.”

This is a historical situation that I point to every time the subject of change management and documentation comes up.  To many people, this could seem like an insignificant change with little danger, but look at what the costs were.  Quite simply, all changes, assumptions, and requirements must be detailed and understood by the whole team.

Many, but not all, companies use the concept of a change control board (CCB).  This can be beneficial, but whether you use a CCB or just circulate a change control doc through the whole team, both processes are meant to get buy-in and sign-off on the change by every group represented on the project.  A CCB can represent a lot of unnecessary overhead that isn’t required if your team is mature enough to manage itself, but, whatever it takes, the change must be reviewed by all departments represented for possible impacts to scope, resources, or time.

Death of a project is always in the white spaces.  For this reason, we document everything we can.  Don’t get me wrong, I would never recommend documenting just for the sake of documentation.  I hate that shit.  However, we document what we know (knowns), what we know we don’t know (known unknowns), and this leaves us with what we don’t know that we don’t know (unknown unknowns).  If you completed all of this, then when your Mars lander crashes into the planet and you check the documentation and find out that everything was to be calculated in English units you can ask “Now, who fucked up?”

The first thing documentation is meant to do is communicate.  The next thing documentation is meant to do is provide traceability.  Change orders, of course, document any changes to the approved plan.  However, there is one other thing a change order does.

A change order can show whether or not a project was kicked off pre-maturely.  Some of you may be asking “How is that possible?”  Well, here’s the deal.  Let’s say that you are in the engineering phase of a project.  You are doing a monthly review and showing how you are falling behind schedule and somebody, of course, asks “Why?”  You then switch to the next slide and show them all the change orders that have come in from say Marketing or the Customer and it doesn’t take too much time to figure out that somebody didn’t know what the hell they wanted when the project got kicked off.

In short, change orders are a necessary part of project management.  There is no such thing as a small change.  Everything has an impact.  Always remember, whether the change orders are for communication or tracking, they must be completed to be of any use.

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