How to reduce costs by fine-tuning your change request processes

How to reduce costs by fine-tuning your change request processes

Change is inevitable for any IT project. If you’ve managed a project before, you’ve probably seen it over and over again. Sometimes the change is big and costly, and it requires a fine-tuning to your scope and good planning. Other times, it’s minimal and doesn’t have a big impact on your project.

Either way, as a project manager, you have to stay on top of change request processes to avoid any uncontrolled change as it can be one of the biggest foes for you. It can increase cost, impact your project timeline and effect both in-house and external teams negatively. You may not be able to keep the project changes from happening, that’s for sure – but, you can definitely manage them efficiently.

Optimization and reduction of costs remain a main priority for companies of all sizes. The good thing is a solid change request management solution can be your best friend. It can guide you through change management activities during any project and make sure you don’t delay and end up costing your company more money in the end. Here are 3 tips for you to reduce costs by fine-tuning your change request processes.

1.Avoid using email for your Approval/Reject processes

In the modern world, many businesses use email for communication and collaboration. Email has been an effective tool for increasing productivity for a long time. On the surface, this seems like a good thing and while email is still the go-to-medium for many businesses, it can only be effective when we use it the way it is intended to be used. 

When change requests are handled via emails, it can bring more harm than good. Email can easily cause information overload & loss, some big change requests can easily be dismissed or left unread.

And as we all know, going through emails takes time. While some people tend to get back right away, many others can disregard messages with the change requests which require responses as soon as they are received and read. These change requests can include minor changes but also significant ones which can drastically alter the project. That’s why they need to be handled properly. 

When there is a healthy change request management in place, you can easily manage all these requests in a timely manner, make sure every single one of them is dealt effectively and reduce the costs of your project management and IT collaboration.

2. Keep track of all the efforts and costs accurately

Keeping track of all the efforts and costs is a challenging task in the change management process. Creating a plan for a project’s effort & cost tracking isn’t simply enough. Difficulties with such effort and cost estimation can cause estimations being way far from the actual results at the end. It’s no surprise then, this inconsistency becomes the reason for increased costs.

When you don’t have a healthy, central tracker for all of their efforts and costs related to change requests, it’s easy to keep up with it and make sure you are within the budget.

To prevent this cause of failure, you must have a digital change request management solution to make sure you can track all your CR costs easily and accurately. With proper tracking, you can deliver something on time efficiently while cutting costs.

3.Manage your teams’ communications through a single platform

Change requests are an inevitable part of any project and excellent communication is the key in any successful project. In fact, according to a study from the Project Management Institute (PMI), one of the biggest reason for project failures is poor communication.

When you have more than one contractor as your solution partner, managing change request processes can become even tougher. Working with multiple parties working in your project including freelancers, in-house teams or external companies, you need to keep all the communication running efficiently to make sure change requests are handled effectively without friction.

A powerful change request management solution such as MaestroCR makes it easy for teams to communicate during the whole CR cycle and ensures project and IT managers have timely information. It makes your organization more productive and being more productive carries a significant potential for reducing costs and increasing competitiveness.

Get started with MaestroCR today.

You might also be interested in reading Managing Change Requests With Multiple Contractors.