What Is Effective Change Management?

Change Management means that the project organization makes corresponding partial or complete changes to the project plan in order to adapt to changes in various factors related to the project during the operation of the project and to ensure the realization of the project goals, and according to the requirements after the change Organize the process of project implementation.

Change management

Change Management means that the project organization makes corresponding partial or complete changes to the project plan in order to adapt to changes in various factors related to the project during the operation of the project and to ensure the realization of the project goals, and according to the requirements after the change Organize the process of project implementation.

Change management is one of the most important processes in project management. The main task is to analyze the necessity of change.

Chinese name

Change management

Foreign name

Management of change (MOC)

main mission

Analyze the necessity and rationality of the change

Definition

Control and management of change

Change management is Management of change (MOC): When there is a need for change, there must be change control and management.

Its main tasks include: 1. Analyze the necessity and rationality of the change and determine whether to implement the change; 2. Record the change information and fill in the change control form; 3. Make the change and submit it to the superior for approval; 4. Modify the corresponding software Configuration item (baseline), establish new version; 5. Publish new version after review.

The entire software configuration during the software life cycle is the true representative of the software product and must be kept accurate. Changes in a certain stage in the software engineering process must cause changes in the software configuration. Such changes must be strictly controlled and managed to maintain modified information and pass accurate and clear information to the next step in the software engineering process. Software change management includes establishing control points and establishing reporting and review systems.

A project is constantly changing from the beginning. Changes in user requirements require adjustments to the plan or design; tests found problems that require changes to the error code; and even staff loss requires some adjustments to the project to accommodate this situation. Bug management,

Let's look at several major processes in the change life cycle and the requirements of these processes:

Propose: Record the details of the change, which is equivalent to a memo. The information to be recorded may vary according to the regulations of different organizations and different projects. The main point is that the change proposer can concisely record valuable information, such as the environment when the defect occurred, and the function to be changed ...

The change management tool should not only be able to conveniently record the information, but also give the recorder some recording prompt information to help the recorder accurately record the change.

Audit: The reviewer must first confirm the significance of the change and confirm whether it should be modified; secondly, the reviewer must confirm the possible impact of the change, and decide whether to modify the content of the change and make synchronous changes to other aspects of the project based on the impact analysis; and finally, assign the project Members implement the change.

Here, the key is that the reviewer must have a clear understanding of the impact of the change. This understanding does not mean how to modify the change, but if it is modified, what impact it may bring and whether it is worth modifying. Obviously, this information is not given by the change proposer at the time of recording, but should be the reviewer's own assistance to other systems or tools for judgment.

Implementation Modifications: Modifications based on change requirements.

First of all, make sure that the implementation of the modification is complete and thorough. For example, when a requirement change is mentioned, the requirement document cannot be changed without changing the code or user documentation. In the case of organizational division of labor, how to coordinate the simultaneous changes of multiple teams to ensure the consistency of work products is becoming a very serious problem.

An initial purpose of implementing changes is to track and trace back the project. Then, changes made to changes should also be recorded and associated with the changes to achieve two-way tracking of why and what.

Confirmation: Confirm that the change was actually implemented (or that the reason for rejecting the change is reasonable).

Query and

Requirements for change management tools

By observing the change process, in order to achieve the purpose of change, we believe that a good change management tool should have at least the following technical characteristics.

1. The most basic requirement for a change management tool is an information recording function that functions as a memo and communication.

2. Considering the complexity of measurement, especially to adapt to different project characteristics, measurement objectives and measurement statistics theory, the tool needs to provide a flexible and easy-to-use query statistics mechanism to facilitate report customization for various measurement data.

3 Change management is an important process in project management, but it is only a process. A well-functioning project goes beyond change management. Then the change management system should be able to cooperate with other process management parts to achieve organic management and system use of the entire project without causing information silos.

Introduction to several change management tools

There are countless change management tools that can be seen now, we will focus on a few of them: ClearQuest, DSTP, Mantis, Bugfree

ClearQuest:

CQ is a benchmark for change management tools, and no one doubts the function of CQ.

CQ provides powerful customization functions. A CQ is a development platform.

Powerful query and report customization capabilities for change measurement analysis.

Seamless integration with ClearCase for complete tracking of changes.

In addition to supporting WEB access, a desktop client is also provided.

The disadvantage of CQ is that besides the expensive charges, there is also a problem that is adhering to IBM's widely criticized, huge and difficult to maintain!

DSTP: DSTP is an integrated project collaboration platform in which change management features have the following advantages:

1. The content of the change attribute can be customized, and different changes can be unified to manage multiple changes, such as bug management, demand change, and risk management.

2. Like the integration of CQ and CC, DSTP and SVN are tightly integrated. When a user submits a modification on SVN, the change (task) in DSTP is automatically associated as the modification description. When viewing changes, you can directly see which files have been modified by the change and what they have modified!

3. Provide perfect change synchronization function, put forward the concept of system change trace stage, so that the consistency of all work products is guaranteed by the process! The so-called system change tracking refers to a situation where when a user proposes a change in requirements and the system engineer finishes modifying the requirements document, the change does not actually end. The system automatically transitions to the change tracking phase. Only after the code associated with the requirement, user documentation, etc. have been modified, the change will end the tracking phase and enter the confirmation shutdown phase.

4. Cooperate with DSTP's work product management: provide strong support for change impact analysis; changes are directly related to requirements, test plans, etc. to facilitate multi-directional tracking and tracing.