Change Control Board

Change control board is mentioned in monitoring & controlling process group of the pmbok4 guide. Change control board is a very important topic lies under perform integrated change control process and there may be a question on the pmp exam.

Almost every mature organization and projectize organization may have a change control board but it’s not necessary that every single organization should have a change control board. Also there may be a different name to change control board but it may be doing the same function.

What is Change Control Board

Change control board can be referred to as a board or committee or group of stakeholder’s, that analyze and review the change requests that have been forwarded by the project management team and accordingly take decision whether the change request needs to be accepted or rejected.

Who are on the Change Control Board

Stakeholders: when we say stakeholder, it means any one who is impacted by the project. The following may be included in change control board but not limited: Project Manager, Project Management Team, Stakeholders, Senior Management, Sponsor etc.

Role and Responsibility of Change Control Board

Although it’s mentioned in the pmbok, that roles and responsibilities of these boards are well defined and are clearly mentioned with in the organization change control procedures, but they may vary on project bases. The main aim or goal of change control board is to review the change requests and either accept or reject.

Benefit and Importance of Change Control Board

There are many benefits and importance of change control board, but two significant benefits that I could see are, that the blame of implementing or rejecting a certain change should not be fully on the project manager and project management team. e.g: If something goes wrong while a certain change request was either implemented or rejected, the burden or blame is equally shared among all stakeholders. Although it is the responsibility of the project manager and project management team to provide full documentation along with the change request.

Other importance that I could see is that the project manager and his team are sort of free from the unnecessary pressure of a customer or a stakeholder. e.g: The stakeholder or customer could some time stress of either implementing or rejecting a certain request, but since all change request are always refer to the committee and they had to decide what to do with the change request.

Let me summarize some of the points in the change control board, which may be helpful for the pmp exam.

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