Project Management: Foundations to Practice · Monitoring, Control, Closure, and Certification Pathways
Change Control and Configuration Management
Change control and configuration management work together to prevent exactly the kind of uncontrolled drift covered earlier in this course as scope creep. This chapter covers how the two disciplines interlock.
Change control is the formal process for evaluating, approving, or rejecting proposed changes to a project's scope, schedule, or budget baselines, typically managed through a change control board with the authority to make these decisions rather than leaving individual team members to negotiate changes informally with whichever stakeholder happens to ask [1].
Key Takeaways
- Change control formally evaluates, approves, or rejects proposed baseline changes through a designated change control board.
- Configuration management keeps deliverables, documents, and requirements version-controlled and consistent as changes are approved.
- Bypassing formal change control feels faster in the moment but accumulates hidden risk that surfaces later at a worse time.
- Informally negotiated changes, unrecorded and unassessed for impact, are how uncontrolled scope creep most commonly takes hold.