(^156) 97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know
Every Project Manager Is a Contract Administrator
Fabio Teixeira de Melo, PMP
Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz, Mexico
AS ThE PRojECT MAnAgER, you are responsible for change control. You put
together a process for documenting requests and performing the changes. But
how can you control changes when you are not aware that they happened?
The client’s team members will have direct contact with their peers in your
team. Trying to satisfy the client, or being unaware of contractual obligations,
a team member can agree to an extra training session, or even implement a
change to the software, and forget to inform you—or alert you when it is too
late. Some of those changes may be innocuous, but others could bring prob-
lems. For instance, silently altering part of the software features means the
change may remain unmentioned in the software manual. This could lead to
rewrites, reprinting, etc., with all the associated (an unbilled) time and cost.
One might feel tempted to prohibit interaction between members of the cli-
ent’s and the contractor’s project teams, but that can jeopardize communica-
tion. Contracts don’t cover whether or not the client has the right to talk to
your team members. And how can a project manager control whether the
team members and the client are in contact?
To avoid undocumented changes being performed, every team member should
be familiar with the contract, including aspects of scope, time, and each party’s
rights and dues. They should be prepared to analyze the client’s requests when
preparing a contract perspective and know how to alert everyone to future
changes. This requires that the change control and handling process be docu-
mented, and that team members be familiar with it.