How to reduce scope growth with Change Management

Just like it is important to have contract templates in your contract management software, you also need to have a way of estimating and processing the impact of changes to the scope of work. If not controlled, changes can lead to huge cost overruns and delays. Therefore, managing changes is essential in successfully performing cost control.

Prioritize changes

A change is caused by a difference between the original contract requirements and newly imposed or arising subsequent work to this agreement. There are no projects without changes: therefore it is important to have a procedure in place. With proper change management, the impact and amount of changes can be dramatically reduced.

A change can have many origins, like different design requirements, specifications, government regulations or project circumstances that require additional work. The impact of a change on the project is often not limited to the activity itself, but may have an impact on the overall schedule performance of the project. Therefore, it is important to carefully assess and determine the impact before accepting each change. Try to prioritize changes. An example is given below:

To reduce scope growth, a good procedure is to only consider priority 1 and 2 for approval.

Managing scope changes in cost management software

Traditionally, cost estimating software and data used to estimate the project’s budget are separate from the tools used by the cost controller during execution. As the project evolves, gradually any link to the original budget estimate is lost. Cost controllers also often do not have access to the required cost data to properly estimate the impact of a change to the cost of the project.

The Cost Management module of Cleopatra Enterprise allows you to strictly follow your change management process. As a unique feature, it also allows for tight integration with its Estimation module. During project execution, the cost controller has at its disposal the full arsenal of cost data and knowledge to estimate changes. As the project evolves, the cost estimate is kept alive and for 100% linked to the cost management document.

Stop scope growth due to unnecessary changes and be in real control of your projects.