Effective management of project change orders

¶ … Management of Change Orders

Throughout the lifecycle of construction projects there are a myriad of potential factors that can influence the scope of work, period of performance and budget. In the peer reviewed analysis Effective Management of Project Change Orders (Douglas, 2003) the researcher and author provides a theoretical framework of how change orders can be used to mitigate the risks and interruptions that are inevitable in construction projects. He also provides prescriptive guidance on how to optimize the constraints of work scope, the period of performance or timeframe for a given project, and the budgetary considerations and constraints every project must contend with. What emerges from the optimization examples and frameworks given is a lifecycle-based approach to defining change order systems that align with the planning and design, bid and award and construction phases of a project. It is common knowledge that the longer a project's duration the more challenging it is to change requirements, with the final phases being the most difficult ot modify. The author describes a constraint-based view of these trade-offs in the context of a large-scale construction project in the scope of the presented analysis.

Analysis and Critique of Effective Management of Change Orders

In the peer-reviewed analysis and supporting research provided in the article Effective Management of Project Change Orders (Douglas, 2003) the author defines a series of concepts and frameworks that are aligned to each phase of a large-scale construction project, using the triad-based constraint model of scope of work, time period of performance and budget to define the parameters of analysis. Using these parameters as the foundation of analysis, the author provides insightful analysis of how change orders can be used as a catalyst for continual improvement in the fulfillment of each phase of a construction project. One of the shortcomings of this analysis is how the author fails to provide stronger allegorical references and definitions of how the lessons learned can be readily applied to other industries and across different scenarios or more complex, interdependent projects. There is little guidance of how to recover from the nearly fatal errors of continually modifying complex projects in the middle and final stages of development. The author defines these aspects of change orders as potentially fatal yet fails to provide a solid foundation of how to resolve these dilemmas (Douglas, 2003).

Another observation is how the research shows how stakeholders involved with a large-scale project including the owners, architect and key members of the construction firm all need to be coordinated with one another. There is ample evidence from standards definition efforts across the construction industry that the development of collaboration platforms, processes and programs pays dividends when engrained into the culture of an organization (Doyle, Molnar, Brown, 2008). As our course has shown, best practices in managing change in a construction project involves iteration after iteration of involvement and a continual reinforcing of trust and communication. Without these aspects of a project in place and solidified to the foundational culture of a project, change itself has the potential to derail even the best-managed project teams. The text and lectures in class pertaining top change management have also strongly implied the need for clear autonomy and transparency, including the development of trust within and between teams and individuals. Yet in Effective Management of Project Change Orders (Douglas, 2003) these critical factors are not mentioned and there is no implied or expressed infusion of trust into the overall structure of change orders and more specifically, change management. Instead the author continually concentrates on scope, time and budget as the three most critical triangulating factors in defining the overall performance of a project over time. This nearly becomes myopic in the context of the cited article as the framework concentrates only on those aspects that are the most quantifiable and measurable while ironically leaving out the most costly and ironically, least quantifiable aspects of managing change in a project (Douglas, 2003). The only aspects of the cited research that deviate from this highly quantified view of change management is the mention of stakeholders and the development of an effective interaction and listening system. Only then does the very rigid taxonomy and triad models defined through inference in the cited article become more strategic in scope.