Change Management

Project Change Management - a general term describing the procedures used to ensure that changes are introduced in a controlled and coordinated manner.

Change Request – Requests to expand or reduce the project scope, modify policies, processes, plans or procedures, modify costs or budgets, or revise schedules.

Tool: Clear quest Change Management: it enables submit, modify, and track change requests, and analyze project progress by creating queries and reports.

Process:

1. Identify potential change. It can be out of a new requirement or bug in an existing system.
2.  Analyze the change request: determine technical feasibility, cost and benefit of change request
3.  Evaluate change: decision of Go/ No Go for the change request
4. Plan change: The extent of the change (i.e. what other items the change effects) is determined in a CHANGE IMPACT ANALYSIS. It could be argued that this activity leads to another go/no-go decision, or that it even forms a part of the Analyze change request activity. It is modeled here as a planning task for the change builder because of its relationship with the activity Propagate change.
5. Implement Change: execute change, propagate change (The changes resulting from Execute change have to be propagated to other system parts that are influenced by it. Because this and the above sub-activity are highly dependent on each other, they have been modeled as concurrent activities.) test change, update document, release change
6. Review and close change: verify change by project manager and change cycle is completed

Components of a change request:

1.  Summary
2. Type: cosmetic, incorrect functionality, feature request
3.  Date entered
4. Entered by
5. Defect resolution: code change, document change, database change, not our bug,
6.  Priority: High, medium, low, future release, immediate
7.  Severity: causes crash, workaround, no workaround      
8.  Reproducible levels: always, sometimes
9. Version:
10.  Assigned to, assigned by, assigned date, assigned  notes