Project Manager's Spotlight on Change Management E-Book

Claudia M. Baca

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 181

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

Clear-Cut Ways to Manage Inevitable Project Changes If you're a typical project manager, you're probably aware of the importance of change management but may not have the time or expertise to develop a full-blown plan. Here's a quick and practical guide to applying the disciplines of proven change management practices without the rigor of complex processes. Part of the Project Manager's Spotlight series from Harbor Light Press, this straightforward book offers solutions to real-life project change scenarios. Author Claudia Baca highlights critical components of change control and equips you with tools, techniques, checklists, and templates you can put to use immediately. By following a realistic case study from start to finish, you'll see how a project manager deals with each concept. Ultimately, this book will help you establish effective guidelines for dealing with change and provide you the flexibility to minimize disruptions and derailments. Project Manager's Spotlight on Change Management teaches you how to: * Define roles and responsibilities of the change management team * Build a process flow one step at a time * Design your own change management system * Process exceptions and escalations * Create the necessary documentation

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction

The Spotlight Series

What This Book Covers

CHAPTER 1 - Managing Project Change

Change Management Defined

Why Bother with Change Management?

Let’s Set Some Context

Case Study

CHAPTER 2 - Setting Up for Success

The Roles of Change Management

What Do We Control?

Timing Is Everything

Case Study

CHAPTER 3 - The Process of Change Management

Designing Your System

A Few More “To Dos”

Case Study

CHAPTER 4 - The Output of Change Management

Now What?

Yes, the Triple Constraints Are Impacted

The Board Denies the Change

The Board Approves the Change

The Triple Constraints Are Not Impacted

The Project Manager Denies the Change Request

The Project Manager Approves the Change Request

Process Review

Exceptions

Escalations

Case Study

CHAPTER 5 - The Incremental Effect

The Theory of Disruptions

The Theory of Timing

The Theory of Estimating Change Requests

Case Study

CHAPTER 6 - Change Tracking

Documenting a Change Request

Logistics

Making a Change Request Log

Finishing Up

Case Study

APPENDIX A - Nine Knowledge Areas Refresher

APPENDIX B - Change Management Templates

APPENDIX C - Calculating the Critical Path

Glossary

Index

About the Author

Claudia Baca has been active in the project management industry since 1984 and has experience in the information technology, telecommunications, and e-commerce industries. During her varied career, Claudia has managed many mission critical projects for a major telecommunications company and several Internet companies. Currently, Claudia is the Vice President of Consulting Services with QuantumPM. She lectures and teaches for the Project Management Institute’s Denver chapter as well as for Colorado State University. Claudia was a member of the leadership team that produced the standard for Project Management Maturity, OPM3. In addition, she has a Master’s Certificate in Program Management from Denver University. She earned her PMP in 1995 and was recertified in 2001 and 2004.

Claudia also has much experience writing and editing. She is a coauthor of the paper “Organizational Project Management Maturity Model (OPM3)” presented at the PMI Global Congress Europe, 2003. She also coauthored the “The Past, the Present and the Future of OPM3” presented at the PMI Global Congress North America, 2004. In addition, she is the technical editor of the PMP: Project Management Professional Study Guide and the IT Project+ Study Guide and is the coauthor of PMP: Project Management Professional Workbook, all published by Sybex.

Publisher: Neil Edde Acquisitions Editors: Heather O’Connor, Maureen Adams Developmental Editor: Maureen Adams Production Editor: Rachel Gunn Technical Editor: Linda Zaval Copyeditor: Rebecca Rider Compositor: Maureen Forys, Happenstance Type-O-Rama Graphic Illustrator: Jeffrey Wilson, Happenstance Type-O-Rama Proofreaders: Jim Brook, Nancy Riddiough, Amy McCarthy Indexer: Nancy Guenther Book Designer: Maureen Forys, Happenstance Type-O-Rama Cover Designer and Illustrator: Daniel Ziegler, Ziegler Design

Copyright © 2005 SYBEX Inc., 1151 Marina Village Parkway, Alameda, CA 94501. World rights reserved. No part of this publication may be stored in a retrieval system, transmitted, or reproduced in any way, including but not limited to photocopy, photograph, magnetic, or other record, without the prior agreement and written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Card Number: 2005920768

ISBN: 0-7821-4410-1

SYBEX and the SYBEX logo are either registered trademarks or trademarks of SYBEX Inc. in the United States and/or other countries.

Harbor Light Press and the Harbor Light Press logo are trademarks of SYBEX, Inc.

TRADEMARKS: SYBEX has attempted throughout this book to distinguish proprietary trademarks from descriptive terms by following the capitalization style used by the manufacturer.

The author and publisher have made their best efforts to prepare this book, and the content is based upon final release software whenever possible. Portions of the manuscript may be based upon pre-release versions supplied by software manufacturer(s). The author and the publisher make no representation or warranties of any kind with regard to the completeness or accuracy of the contents herein and accept no liability of any kind including but not limited to performance, merchantability, fitness for any particular purpose, or any losses or damages of any kind caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly from this book.

To our valued readers,

Harbor Light Press was created as an imprint of Sybex, Inc. to help business professionals acquire the practical skills and knowledge they need to meet today’s most pressing business challenges.

Our books serve the people responsible for getting the job done—project managers charged with delivering a product on time and under budget; human resource directors faced with a complex array of resource decisions; support staff determined to exceed the goals set for them; and others who recognize that great business plans are only as good as the people who implement and manage them.

Harbor Light Press is committed to publishing authoritative, reliable, yet engaging business books written by authors who are outstanding instructors and experienced business professionals. The goal for all of our books is to connect with our readers, to understand their needs, and to provide them with solutions that they can put to use immediately.

Neil Edde Publisher Harbor Light Press

To my family

Foreword

The Project Manager’s Spotlight Series is written for those of you who are engaged in projects at the day-to-day level of business. You’re working on projects such as server consolidation, piloting new products in the marketplace, or opening a new branch or storefront. These day-to-day projects keep businesses moving forward, carving out market share, meeting strategic goals, and improving the firm’s bottom line. These projects, while vitally important to the companies you work for, are not necessarily multi-million dollar, multi-year projects that require meticulous disciplines and precise methodologies.

The Project Manager’s Spotlight Series shows you the how-to’s of project management on a practical level. These books help you apply solid principles of project management without the rigor. You’ll find tools, tips, and techniques to help you use Project Management Institute-based practices in your small- to medium-sized projects; these are tips you can read over the weekend and be ready and able to apply on Monday morning.

—Kim Heldman

Acknowledgments

There are many people I would like to thank for their efforts on this book. First and foremost, I couldn’t have put this book together without the support and help of the professionals at Sybex who dedicated a lot of their effort and patience.

More specifically, I would like to thank Heather O’Connor, acquisitions editor, and Kim Heldman, my guardian angel throughout this entire process, who both conceived the book as part of the new Spotlight on Project Management series. As a current project manager and a teacher of basic project management courses, I was very excited by the idea of this book. I realized how I had struggled through the years to make change management work for me and felt I had hints and tricks that I could share. Without Heather and Kim’s ideas, enthusiasm, and willingness to work with my ideas, this book simply wouldn’t exist.

I also send many thanks to my second acquisitions editor, Maureen Adams, who took over for Heather. Her wisdom and guidance kept the book on track. I really appreciated her laborious efforts to make this book shine. Also thanks to Rachel Gunn, production editor, and Rebecca Rider, copyeditor, who took my words and made them better in every way. In addition, special thanks to my technical editor Linda Zaval, and again to Kim Heldman for checking my facts and providing additional ideas. This book also required some artwork to be rendered and I appreciate the work of Jeffrey Wilson.

And finally I’d like to thank my family for their love, understanding, and patience as I pursue my passion, project management.

Introduction

This book has been written with you, the project managers of small- to medium-sized projects, in mind. You’re the ones who need just the right amount of project management skills applied to your projects. You don’t need too much rigor; instead, you need just the right amount.

This book shows you how to build an effective change management system from scratch—a system that is effective enough to cover what needs to be controlled without burdening you with too much process. You also learn how to plan your change management system including the roles and responsibilities of each member of the team. In this book, I build a process flow that covers every step you need to have in place in order to be successful.

Last but not least, I spend some time on the nuances of change management—basically, the things that can go wrong when you receive lots of change requests. You’ll find real world hints and tips tucked into every portion of this book. These are drawn from my 20 years of project management experience.

Use this book to set up your own change management system. Once you start seeing some success in this area, you can also use this book as a reference or a troubleshooting guide for the change management problems you encounter. I’ve tried to cover lots of real world scenarios that will help you through the maze of change management problems. Most of all, I hope this book gives you the fundamentals you need to deliver your project.

The Spotlight Series

The Spotlight Series is designed to give you practical, real life information on specific project management topics such as risk, project planning, and change management. Many times, the theory of these processes makes sense when you’re reading about them, but when it’s time to implement, you’re left scratching your head wondering exactly how to go about it. The books in this series are intended to help you put project processes and methodologies into place on your next project without any guesswork. The authors of this series have worked hard to anticipate the kinds of questions project managers might ask, and they explain their topics in a step-by-step approach so that you can put what you’ve read into practice.

If you find that the topic of project management interests you, I strongly recommend that you consider becoming a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) through the Project Management Institute. They are the de facto standard in project management methodologies. You’ll find many organizations now require a PMP certification for project management jobs. For more information on this topic and to help prepare you for this exam, read Kim Heldman’s book, PMP: Project Management Professional Study Guide, Second Edition. Another helpful book to prepare you for the PMP exam is the PMP: Project Management Professional Workbook by this author and Patti Jansen.

What This Book Covers

This book provides a solid foundation on the concepts around change management or as it’s sometimes called, change control. The current Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (available from the Project Management Institute’s bookstore at www.pmi.org) states that you should have a change control system in place. This book tells you what to put in place as well as how to make it successful. The book is organized as follows:

Chapter 1 This chapter covers the fundamentals of change management including the purpose of change management and its definition. Here, I establish the vocabulary of change management that I use throughout the rest of the book. Finally I talk about project and product lifecycles and how change management is applied to these.

Chapter 2 In this chapter, we start by discussing the roles and responsibilities of the people who work with and around a change management system. I then cover what elements of a project get controlled. After that, we spend some time on the sequence of change management and how you plan for the changes you’ll face.

Chapter 3 This entire chapter deals with the process of change management. It builds a process flow one step at a time, explaining each step in length. Throughout, you will find hints and tips to apply as you design your change management system.

Chapter 4 We continue building on our process flow in this chapter by dealing with the output of a change management process. We also spend some time dealing with process exceptions and process escalations.

Chapter 5 In this chapter, we discuss what I call the incremental effect—namely, how the addition of change requests affects your overall project goals. This chapter is loaded with tips and tricks to help you deal with real world problems when things start to go wrong.

Chapter 6 In this chapter, I cover the documentation you need to effectively manage change. I talk about what forms you need, what tracking you need to implement, and what type of data you should gather.

Appendices You’ll find the appendices packed with good information. We cover the fundamentals of the PMBOK Guide in Appendix A and the basics of critical path analysis in Appendix C. Both are provided in case you need more in-depth information on these subjects. Appendix B covers templates discussed throughout the book. I have provided a change request form and a change request log for you to use and modify for your own projects. I have also included a complete change management process flow for you to use in building your own process.

I sincerely hope the Project Manager’s Spotlight on Change Management becomes your favorite reference book on project management tools and techniques. May you have many years of successful projects!

CHAPTER 1

Managing Project Change

A mysterious element affects every project and yet it is not often planned for. What is this phenomenon? Some call it Murphy’s Law. Some call it scope creep. Some call it change. Whatever you call it, you can employ tools and techniques to help you manage it to the benefit of your project. This book provides you with the ins and outs of successful change management.

I start this chapter by relating the basics of change management. I then cover the definition of and the purpose of change management. Following this, I explain some of the common terms used in change management as well as how change management is referenced in generally accepted project management principles. Lastly, I talk about project and product lifecycles.

At the conclusion of this chapter, I introduce a case study that you can follow throughout the book. You’ll get a chance to witness a project manager deal with the concepts I introduce in each chapter.

Change Management Defined

Change is inevitable and most of us project managers deal with more than our share of it on our projects. Most of us tend to think of change in terms of problems or negative consequences. Although it’s true that change can be bad, it can also be good.

For example, think of a project at a major manufacturing plant. This plant hires a consulting firm to help design a new product. Halfway through the construction process, the plant requests a set of changes, but because they just asked for more product functionality, they are willing to spend more money. In this case, I bet the consulting company loves change.

Right now, you might be asking yourself why this last example constituted a change. It’s time to clarify what I mean when I refer to change management and get clear about what change management is or, as it’s sometimes called, change control.

How would you define change management? First let me explain that there are really three different elements to change management.

1. The first element of change management deals with the authority level of the project manager. You need to make sure that you have the authority to approve and deny changes that impact your project.

2. The second element of change management involves setting up an environment that fosters good change management. You need to communicate with the entire project team to set expectations on how changes on the project are to be handled.

3. The third element of change management involves setting up a system that helps you determine that a change has been requested. This system also helps you decide if you should make the change and allows you to track the change regardless of whether it is approved or denied. This system should also be comprehensive enough allow for exceptions like the following: What do you do with escalations? How do you handle people who won’t follow the rules? and so on.

If you take these three elements into account, you could define change management as the proactive identification and management of modifications to your project.

Why Bother with Change Management?

I’ve known a couple of project managers who did not bother to set up a change management system on their projects. The first was barraged with requests from the client organization. She accepted all of the requests believing that she was keeping the client happy. Her good intentions actually kept her from delivering on time and within budget—she was about six months late and well over budget. When the project was complete, she had to review all of the project’s problems in a project review meeting. This turned out to be grueling. It was determined by her senior management that her project management style was too loose and amiable. She was banned from managing projects of that magnitude again until she improved her results. Instead of being a hero, she ended up with a letter of reprimand in her personnel file.

The other project manager also decided that he did not need a change management process. Instead he just said no to every change that came his way. He was about four months into his project before the company replaced him. The clients and team members found him hard to work with and thought he was more concerned with finishing the project than making sure that the project he delivered was the right product for the company.

I know these examples really depict the ultimate extremes of the change management spectrum—there are millions of situations in between these. What typically happens to a project manager may simply be the result of not taking a change seriously. For instance, the project manager may approve a small change that ends up slipping the end date of the project. Without good change management in place, you are depending on luck, overtime, and your own personal power to deliver the project. In the end, you may end up drawing on all of these anyway, but you only want to use them when you have an emergency, not because you failed to plan for changes.

The bottom line then is that change is one of those necessary evils you must manage and manage well if you want to deliver on time, on budget, and with the quality defined by the client. Now let’s move on and talk some more about change management definitions.

NOTE Managing project changes well leads to projects that are on time, on budget, and within defined quality guidelines.

Let’s Set Some Context

You may not be familiar with the term change management. Instead, you may have seen the terms change control, change management system, and so on. Well, they all mean the same thing—the process that is used to control project changes.

Change management is an integral part of the generally accepted principles covered in the PMBOK Guide . If you need a refresher on the project management processes and knowledge areas, refer to Appendix A of this book.

If you check the glossary of this guide you will not find the term change management. This is because change management is a widely known term in the project management field that refers to the overarching system that manages change (system here means an assemblage of processes, forms, and possibly software). You will, however, find the term control used throughout the PMBOK Guide and defined in its glossary. You’ll also find the term change control in the five major project management process groups as well as mentioned in several of the project management knowledge areas.

Table 1.1 shows the intersection between processes and the knowledge areas; this highlights the areas concerned with change management. You’ll also find this diagram in Appendix B for your future use.

You’ll notice that Table 1.1 shows the abbreviation T&T. This stands for Tool and Technique. That phrase is used in the PMBOK Guide to denote a commonly accepted practice that is used in a process to get the results you are expecting. Change management is just that—a tool that you use to manage change.

NOTE In case you are new to project management, check out the ANSI standard on project management, A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge, 2000 Edition, by the Project Management Institute. www.pmi.org

TABLE 1.1: Project processes, knowledge areas, the emphasis on change management

The Controlling Processes

After reviewing Appendix A, you know that there are five major process groups executed during a project. In real life, Project Managers use these process groups to successfully start a project, plot the project activities, direct the project activities while they are being performed, and finally, complete the project. We undertake projects to satisfy the goals that the stakeholders determined during the project initiation.

That fourth process group, controlling processes, relates directly to our work here in change management. This controlling process group is concerned with monitoring and regulating the activities of the project to ensure that the goals of the project are met. This monitoring and regulating produces information that you can measure to see what variances have occurred. Once you understand that variances have occurred, you can take corrective action to keep your project on track to meet the project’s objectives. We will set up our change management system in this book using these fundamentals of the controlling process group.