Change Management Made Easy ! !

       

We know only “Change” is constant in life and everything else can be obsolete with time . Certainly IT has  a constant challenge/ impact in project management too.

Mostly our customers don’t know what they don’t know, and even they know they can’t articulate it properly so they routinely ask for something more or different. Tough Our teams are comprised of talented, creative people who often recognize opportunities for improvement of either the project’s deliverables or the processes agreed to for producing those deliverables MOST of the time delivers something which later on don’t attract/interest customers.

There are the changes that are driven by evolving business objectives, new constraints from regulations, the marketplace, etc. With change impacting the project from all of these sources, both on a requested and on a discovered basis, how can a project manager possibly expect to control anything?

Our first challenge is to realize that we cannot control change. We need to adjust our perspective. Our job is not to control change, but rather to control the impact of change on the project.

Such an adjustment in perspective enables us to avoid the trap of beginning to see our stakeholders as uncooperative villains who are deliberately trying to make our lives miserable. Focusing on controlling the impact of changes on the project permits us to approach each change as a problem to be solved, just like any other issue or technical challenge.

  
                     

How to cope us with change / sustain the impact of change process / incorporate change ??

• Document everything.

Whether we manage our project formally or informally, how changes will be captured, evaluated, prioritized, decided, executed, and communicated needs to be clearly understood both within the team and among the remainder of the project’s stakeholder population. Additionally, every change that is requested or discovered after the fact needs to be recorded to create a history of the migration of requirements, expectations, and commitments throughout the project lifecycle. Such documentation can, and probably should be simple, but it indisputably needs to be.

• KISS:  Keep it Short & sweet i.e. simple :

Since we are focused on trying to control the impact of change on our project, we want to encourage our stakeholders to request changes before they begin to affect the project. To gain consistent cooperation requires that the process of requesting or identifying change be easy to engage, understand, and follow through. A documented process helps; a process that can be communicated and understood from a diagram (flow chart, swim lane diagram, etc.) is even better.

• Let all people know about IT :

We must:

• Engage our key stakeholders in defining, or at least influencing, the definition of the process.
• Recognize who the influence leaders are among our stakeholders and engage them as champions for change control on the project.
• Remember that people learn through repetition, which means that we must systematically and regularly remind and reinforce our document, simple process.

• Enforce SLOWLY , one after another, gradually but  consistently.

If we engage stakeholders in helping to define the change control process, and we have them explicitly agree to comply with the process, then we will garner greater cooperation with the process.

When we make exceptions in the way we carry out our process, we open the door for our stakeholders to manipulate and subvert the process. Allowing a stakeholder, say the sponsor, to make changes without adhering to the defined process simply tells others that the process isn’t really important and that exceptions are possible.

If the sponsor asks for change, then rather than requesting a change request form (CR)- a potentially career-limiting move - we can put the request in writing, ask the sponsor to confirm our interpretation of the request, and then execute the evaluation and recommendation steps of our process as normal.

  

  

There is no “golden arrow” in project management - especially in change control, but by remembering and adhering to these basic rules, we can improve the quality of change control on our projects.

Regards
Sajal
7411356308--bangalore
8798129721--kolkata
http://www.smilesentrust.com/products

www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mAZYVaKWGI