Change Control: Do You Own It or Does It Own You?
Over the last year, I have noticed a myriad of projects that begin to struggle once they begin the change control process. Doesn’t matter the type or size of project – they all appear to drop-the-ball when it comes to following the change control process. This pain surfaces not only in the schedule and budgets, but also in the lack of trust that builds between the business and technology teams.
I want to share some best practices than can help teams manage change control in a more disciplined format. In this first post, I discuss the key roles that should be involved in change control.
What is the typical change control process?
In a typical scenario, the business or project stakeholder comes to the table and says they want to change some functionality. This can be a change to something already built, or it could be a change to some requirements you have collected but haven’t implemented.
When asking for the change, the stakeholders typically want to understand any impact to cost or schedule before committing and asking you to “implement” or “deliver” the change.
What are the roles typically involved in change control?
In a typical change control process, the roles look something like this:
After a change request is submitted, someone is responsible for tracking and reviewing (think triage here) the change request. Acting as an editor, they review the change request and make sure the request is complete and without ambiguities. If there are any gaps or missing information, they go back to the “requester” or to the stakeholders to get the missing information. Obviously that’s pretty standard practice.
Next, one of the technology team members needs to assess the change request and determine what, if any, impact it will have on the current plans. By assessing, I mean sitting down and evaluating the impact of this change request against schedule, budget and staff. They may also identify questions for the stakeholders that need to be answered before they can complete their assessment.
This is where you typically have a “go to person” to do this initial assessing. This resource will typically be asking questions like:
- Are we short on staff to handle this request?
- What impact will there be to schedule?
- What additional risk and/or dependencies does this add to our project?
- Do I need any “specialists” or unique tools for this request?
- And so on
The Changing Roles of Change Control
This is where I suggest including a larger team to do the change evaluation. Many of you may already use this approach. Kudos!
But for the rest of us, I suggest that we get a total view when assessing the impact of a change request. This means include a business analyst, quality analyst, etc. in the assessment. I know there are some Agile teams that do this with all team members. Woohoo!
Why is this so important? Because one person probably can’t truly know the impact this change will have on other parts of the development or the development process.
For example the change may be trivial for the developer because it will take just two hours effort. However, the Quality Assurance team may have to rerun all of the regression tests, impacting the schedule by up to two days. A business analyst may actually look at the change and say, “Given the change, do we need to change three other things in the system so they’re all behaving consistently?” All of a sudden, the business analyst may have to modify other requirements. The dominoes may begin to tumble.
I suggest you make sure all roles on your team are included. It would be sufficient if a single team member plays multiple roles as long as this person knows they’re representing these other roles and thinks through the implication to other scheduling, staffing and costs.
Communicating Change
Make sure change requests are communicated across the entire team. Communication to and within the team is a discipline. Some of my experiences this year have reinforced that communicating changes isn’t optional.
Many team members think a trivial change (like a cosmetic change) doesn’t require informing the entire team. Again, this is NOT optional. It must be understood that we as a team are committed to each other and we’re not going to ”surprise” each other with changes requests. Once that is established, we need to educate the business, clients, and stakeholders about our change control process and that they, too, must follow it.
Three Key Take-Aways:
- If you don’t have a change control process, implement one quickly.
- If you have one, but you’re not using the discipline to enforce it every single time a change comes through, you need to introduce that discipline to the team.
- If you have a process and discipline, make sure that when you do the assessment all the roles are included (even if it’s one person representing the roles). Reinforce that the efforts of the QA, BA, etc. have to be taken into consideration.
Do you have any other key best-practices for handling change control?
Category: Defining Success, For Practitioners, Team Performance