Change management

The Change Management process in Systems Engineering is the process of requesting, determining attainability, planning, implementing and evaluation of changes to a system. It has two main goals : supporting the processing of changes – which is mainly discussed here – and enabling traceability of changes, which should be possible through proper execution of the process described here.

There is considerable overlap and confusion between change management, change control and configuration management. The definition below does not yet integrate these.Change management is an important process, because it can deliver vast benefits (by improving the system and thereby satisfying "customer needs"), but also enormous problems (by ruining the system and/or mixing up the change administration). Furthermore, at least for the Information Technology domain, more funds and work are put into system maintenance (which involves change management) than to the initial creation of a system.[2] Typical investment by organizations during initial implementation of large ERP systems is 15-20% of overall budget.

In the same vein, Hinley [3] describes two of Lehman’s laws of software evolution: the law of continuing change (i.e. systems that are used must change or automatically become less useful) and the law of increasing complexity (i.e. through changes the structure of a system becomes ever more complex and more resources are needed to simplify it).The field of manufacturing is nowadays also confronted with many changes due to increasing and worldwide competition, technological advances and demanding customers.[4] Therefore, (efficient and effective) change management is also of great importance in this area.

It is not unthinkable that the above statements are true for other domains as well, because usually, systems tend to change and evolve as they are used. Below, a generic change management process and its deliverables are discussed, followed by some examples of instances of this process.