Scope changes happen on almost every project. What matters is whether each one gets raised, costed, and approved in the open, or absorbed silently until the budget explains itself.
Scope changes happen on almost every project. What matters isn't avoiding them entirely, it's whether each one gets raised, costed, and approved in the open, or absorbed silently until the budget explains itself at the end.
Anyone can raise a change: your process owner, our consultant, even a tester who spots a real gap. It's logged the same day, in writing, against the signed-off design.
The engagement lead sizes it against cost, timeline, and anything downstream it touches, usually within three business days.
Whoever owns that category of decision (see our governance page) signs off or declines, in writing, before any work starts against it.
Approved or rejected, it goes into the running change log the whole steering committee can see, not a private note between two people.
A clarifying question or a genuine defect gets fixed without going through this process; it was already part of the agreed scope. A stop-and-check gets triggered specifically when a request would add a deliverable, alter a signed-off design decision, or shift the go-live date, because those are the three things that quietly rewrite a budget if they slide through unlogged.
Yes, though "assess impact" for a genuinely small change can take an hour, not three days. The steps stay the same; the time each one takes scales with the size of the request.
Whoever owns that category of decision under our governance model, typically your project sponsor for anything touching budget or timeline, and the relevant process owner for a design-only change.
The steps still run, just compressed into hours instead of days, with the engagement lead available for an immediate call rather than waiting for the next scheduled review.
They stay in the log with the reason they were declined. Some get revisited later, as a fast-follow item after go-live, rather than forgotten entirely.
A single approver is a bottleneck and a single point of failure. Splitting the assess and approve steps, and logging every outcome visibly, means no one change quietly rewrites the budget unnoticed.
Tell us how change requests get handled today. We'll tell you honestly whether that would hold up under real pressure.
With someone who has run this before.
The six stages this page fits into, end to end.