Change management (engineering)

The change management process in systems engineering is the process of requesting, determining attainability, planning, implementing, and evaluating of changes to a system. Its main goals are to support the processing and traceability of changes to an interconnected set of factors.

There is considerable overlap and confusion between change management, change control and configuration management. The definition below does not yet integrate these areas.

Change management has been embraced for its ability to deliver benefits by improving the affected system and thereby satisfying "customer needs," but has also been criticized for its potential to confuse and needlessly complicate change administration. In some cases, notably in the Information Technology domain, more funds and work are put into system maintenance (and change management) than into the initial creation of a system. Typical investment by organizations during initial implementation of large ERP systems is 15 to 20 percent of overall budget.

In the same vein, Hinley describes two of Lehman's laws of software evolution:

Change management is also of great importance in the field of manufacturing, which is confronted with many changes due to increasing and worldwide competition, technological advances and demanding customers. Because many systems tend to change and evolve as they are used, the problems of these industries are experienced to some degree in many others.

Notes: In the process below, it is arguable that the change committee should be responsible not only for accept/reject decisions, but also prioritization, which influences how change requests are batched for processing.

For the description of the change management process, the meta-modeling technique is used. Figure 1 depicts the process-data diagram, which is explained in this section.

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