Practical Project Metrics III
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from the President | ... And, So I Tweet | Featured Article: Practical Project Metrics III |
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Project change management is primarily a control and monitoring tool. As a control tool, change management reduces scope creep by only allowing valuable changes into the project. It also allows the project team to adjust schedule and cost appropriately.
As a monitoring tool, the project manager can track changes within a project to identify and address technical as well as project management issues.
When we roll these up across multiple projects, we can identify both Procedural and cultural issues.
I once took over a project that was in trouble, where the previous project manager left in disgrace. I asked the team to show me the project change forms and the change log. They indicated they didn't have any forms (which I discovered was one of the root causes of the problem), but the previous project manager did keep a change log. The log was unsophisticated - simply a list of change requests, hand-written on loose-leaf paper in a 3-ring binder. I found entries written in crayon (really). The crayon entries didn't bother me or slow me down - the problem with this project jumped right off the page. We had a client who was out of control. The page was full of client-requested changes, most of which were never implemented - primarily because they fell through the cracks.
The root cause was a project manager who was trying too hard to please the client. He'd accept change requests and try to do them. Soon, they came so fast, he couldn't keep up and lost control of the project. Had he completed the standard change control forms, it would have forced him to confront the cost and schedule impact of the changes which may have saved the project.
This project manager was not alone. The organization was so focused on making their clients happy that they neglected to control their projects. Interestingly, the result was very unhappy clients.
While I could save this project, executive management had to address the cultural problem - a concept they found very difficult.
The change management process is a gatekeeper: a filter. It is designed to allow good and beneficial changes to pass through to the project and prevent bad and non-beneficial changes from affecting the project.
In addition to just capturing scope change requests, you should identify the cause for the change. These might include: environmental change, incomplete client interviews, client who doesn’t know what they want, poor requirements gathering procedures, etc.
Carefully categorizing and tracking the causes for change will help you improve your procedures.
Change management also serves to identify problems. If, for example, the project team failed to identify a set of requirements, the remedies would ultimately appear as change requests. Similarly, if the systems design was faulty, changes might appear during system build or integration. In any case, change requests would be issued.
Quality Control is the Gatekeeper of Project Quality
Recall that quality assurance reviews the project team's work against the procedures. Also recall that quality control reviews the products of the work against the requirements. As either Q/A or Q/C identify problems, these ultimately result in change requests run through the change management system.
Ultimately, all problems, technical, procedural, or human, end up in the change management system. You only need categorize these to capture areas for improvement. Ideally an organization that oversees all of project management (such as a PMO) should define these categories.
Change management is the repository for all issues.
Our objective in this article is to identify areas to improve project management in the organization, not necessarily specific projects, although the same techniques were well for both situations.
The PMO, therefore, should identify the key areas to catalogue changes in projects within its purview. By doing this, all project managers will catalogue their change requests the same way, allowing the PMO to roll-up the metrics across the organization. This will result in two graphs identified beyond.
This is a trend graph that shows whether the number or impact of changes is improving or worsening across the organization. A sample graph is shown below.
Note that while most change requests are improving (reducing), one is increasing. This helps the PMO identify were it should focus to improve the methodology or culture.
The second chart plots either the count or impact of changes in descending order as a bar chart. Then, plot the cumulative effects of those changes in a line graph as shown below.This is a classic pareto chart which identifies which issues to confront first. You can plot either the count or effect (in time or cost) the changes cause to as you wish.
You now have clear direction to improve project management.