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Jha</h4> <p class="text"> For most project managers, project is a journey through different color statuses, typically from green (on track) to yellow (at risk) to red (missed target) and finally to blue (completed). The journey is often painful and brings about plenty of nuisance along its course. The reasons can be many, such as, schedule slippage, cost overrun, resource issues, product quality concerns, unknown issues, hard dependencies, and unstated customer expectations. Sometimes, these factors are interlinked and they add to one another. </p> <p class="text"> Most of the trouble can be avoided or minimized if the project is planned, executed, monitored and controlled properly. The project management plan should elaborately address the Project Management Institute's nine project management knowledge areas: project integration management, project scope management, project time management, project cost management, project quality management, project human resource management, project communications management, project risk management and project procurement management. It always helps to look at the lessons learnt from previously completed similar projects in the organization. Asking experts in the organization also provides a lot of information and helps in preparing for risks and issues. </p> <p class="text"> One can plan for certain known and unknown events. However, there is a saying: &#034;If everything is going exactly to plan, something somewhere is going massively wrong.&#034; This adage is so applicable to projects. Such is the nature of projects that everything is not known at the beginning and it is nearly impossible to plan for all possible events at the start of a project. A lot of assumptions are made in the planning process&#151;whether or not they are explicitly documented that is a different matter. At the same time, plans are progressively elaborated. A plan should have room for anticipating, realizing, controlling and accommodating changes in a formal and systematic manner. </p> <p class="text"> People are averse to change, and change often upsets people, but one should always expect change in a project. If changes are not identified, controlled and managed properly then they will derail any project and will create an environment of chaos and confusion. Change should never be discouraged; rather it should be handled properly. As changes are inevitable in projects, appropriate planning and execution of change control is essential. In this light, let us look at how change management can keep the project on track. </p> <p class="text"> Generally, change to the baseline of any one or more of the triple constraints (schedule, scope, and cost) are most consequential. These constraints are like the three sides of a triangle and geometrically; if the length of any one side changes, it affects at least one of the other sides. There can be so many reasons for the changes to these three project factors, reasons vary from project to project and from one situation to the other. </p> <p class="text"> Be careful, as most of the time people have a narrow understanding of scope. Scope is not just the business requirements specification of the final product. It goes beyond that. Here, schedule refers to the final end date and cost refers to the cost at the completion of the project. Some interim milestones may be impacted, but as long as the project team is able to meet the final end date, this should not be so big a concern. Similarly, even if interim budgets run over, but if the project is able to meet the final budget by making adjustments, a change request is usually not warranted. Consider a scenario where the customer is asking for a change in the scope of the project. As project manager, try to understand the change, meet with your experts to analyze the impact to the existing scope, quality, time and budget, and submit a change request as per the change management plan and incorporate the scope change into he baseline only after the change request is approved. Until the change request is approved, a project team should continue doing the business as usual. </p> <p class="text"> In another example, suppose, after couple of months into a project, you realize that the project will exceed the budget by an order of magnitude (OOM) of more than 100%. It has become extremely difficult to meet the timelines unless the scope is reduced or extra budget is approved to secure more people. In this case, you should write a change request form to suggest change in budget and timeline. Make sure, you gather enough input to predict the new cost and time to ensure the changes are justified reasonably. We know that every plan is based on a set of assumptions. Cost and timelines may have been estimated and planned in the beginning based on certain assumptions. As the assumptions fail, it affects these two constraints. This point should be clearly mentioned in the change request document (also called change control document) describing what assumption failed, the risks driving cost and timeline higher, efforts made to avoid the situation, and the alternatives available to the management. The request should explain very clearly the consequences of approving and not approving the change control, so that senior management can make an informed decision. Once the symptoms of cost and time overruns are identified and there are no alternatives to keep them in control (without the approval of a change control), the project is in yellow status. If the milestones are missed or the cost is beyond the approved budget, the project goes to red status. However, once the above described change control is approved, then the project can be brought back to green status. </p> <p class="text"> You can overcome the challenges of changes in triple constraints by knowing these tricks and practicing the described change control technique. Thus, the journey of colors can be traversed from green to red or red to green in a systematic and non-chaotic manner. &#9830; <br> <br> <br> <b>Read more <a href="http://ittoday.info/ITPerformanceImprovement/index.htm"><i>IT Performance Improvement</i></a></b> </p> <!--DISCLAIMER NOTICE AND COPYRIGHT--> <p class="copyright"> <br> <br> Certain names and logos on this page and others may constitute trademarks, servicemarks, or tradenames of <a HREF="http://www.crcpress.com" TARGET="_parent">Taylor & Francis LLC.</a> Copyright &#169; 2008&#151;2011 Taylor & Francis LLC. All rights reserved. </font> </p> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </td> <td width="300"> <table> <tbody> <tr> <td> <table style="background-color:#E0E0D1;" cellpadding="10" margin="5" border="0" valign="top"> <tbody> <tr> <td colspan="2"> </td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2"> <h4>About the Author</h4> <p class="text"> <b>Shankar K. Jha, PMP</b>, is a Senior Manager with a leading IT, BPO, and consulting company. The author of <a href="http://www.crcpress.com/shopping_cart/products/product_detail.asp?isbn=9781439809952&AF=WAUER" target="blank"><b>The Project Manager's Communication Toolkit</b></a>, he has more than 12 years of managerial experience at various levels and more than seven years experience as a project and program manager working with some big multinational and Fortune 100 companies. Over the last six years, he has been involved with training on project management topics to project managers, team leads, resource managers, and other customers. <br> </p> </p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan=2> <h4>Also by Shankar K. Jha</h4> </td> </tr> <tr valign="top"> <td> <center> <img src="http://www.ittoday.info/catalog/images/covers80w/K10497.jpg" Border=1> </center> </td> <td> <h4> <a href="http://www.crcpress.com/shopping_cart/products/product_detail.asp?isbn=9781439809952&AF=WAUER" target="blank"><b>The Project Manager's Communication Toolkit</b></a> </h4> </td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2"> <p class="text"> <b><i>A valuable resource for program and project managers at all levels and all industries. Shankar very successfully managed very large and complex projects for my organization utilizing many of these tools and techniques.</i></b> <br> <br> &#151;Nancy Couture, V. P. Enterprise Intelligence, Ingenix </p> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </table> </body> </html>