One of the biggest challenges in project management is controlling project scope.  Changes to the scope of a project directly affect the schedule and cost of the project.

The established best practice is to use a Change Management log to record and get approval for change requests.  Companies with well developed project management processes often have formalized processes for submitting and approving change requests.  Other companies don’t and it’s up to the project manager to put this in place at the beginning of a project.

What really often happens is that a spreadsheet is created somewhere for the change log.  This is stashed in the project manager’s local files, or even some SharePoint document library. 

These can be obscure places. So if the change log is not kept up to date or the approval process isn’t being followed properly, a lot of precious time can go by before it’s noticed.  That is how scope creep sneaks up on you!

Having scope change requests in a standard place makes them more transparent to stakeholders and team members.

pmPoint provides a ready-to-use Project Change Requests list that is prominently linked right off a project’s home site.  Its part of the BrightWork project templates, so every project can have its Project Change Requests list set up automatically.

The Project Change Requests list supplies a good set of fields needed to evaluate a scope change (you can easily hide the fields you don’t need or add new ones).  And a range of Alert options are available to notify the project manager and other stakeholders when a request has been added, modified or approved.

If you are already a pmPoint user, you will find the Project Change Requests list in the ITPM templates and the Project Structured template (for SharePoint 2010).  You can also simply add the list to the project templates you already use.  At the site home page, just click Site Actions | Create, (in SharePoint 2010, click More Options…) then click Project Change Requests s (BrightWork) and fill out the form.