A change is an event, action, or condition that affects the scope, value, or duration of a project or task. Change management is the process of creating, managing, resolving, implementing, and communicating changes.

Change management encompasses both change requests and change orders.

• Change requests enable you plan for and document potential changes to the scope of a project and facilitate its approval. Using a change request you can estimate changes to a project's cost or revenue financial plans by entering and tracking potential changes in cost transactions. You can plan for changes in cost transactions based on use of direct project resources or resources obtained from suppliers. The estimated transactions are then summarized as impacts so you can view the potential changes to your project financial plans. Once the impacts are summarized, you can modify them or add additional revenue impacts if your project has a separate revenue budget. For more information on cost and revenue planning lines, see: Planning for Cost and Revenue Impacts section. A change request can also have workplan, staffing, contract, supplier, and other impacts. Impacts enable you to define and quantify the effect of a change to the scope of a project. Once a change Request is approved, you can either include the change request in a change order to implement the impacts or include the impact directly into plan versions of unapproved financial plan types. Including a change request in a change order closes the change request.

• Change orders enable you to track and implement the impacts of changes to a project. Like change requests, you can use the change order to plan for project changes by estimating changes in cost transactions and summarize them as budget impacts. A change order can also have workplan, staffing, contract, supplier, and other impacts. You can merge the impacts of multiple change requests into a single change order. Once approved, you can implement the impact of a change order. You can close a change order after all impacts are implemented.

Change requests and change orders are sometimes referred to collectively in Oracle Projects as change documents.

The change management process often requires the collection of input from various people associated with the project, and other interested parties. Oracle Projects provides you with a centralized change management system that enables you to manage this process and communicate change in a consistent and timely manner.

Change management offers many features, such as the ability to:

• Use a predefined set of change document types.

• Define statuses for change documents according to the needs of your organization.

• Associate related issues and documents with a change document.

• Enable team members to create and manage change documents.

• Search for change documents across projects.

• Define the impacts of change requests and change orders.

• Include change requests in change orders.

• Copy existing issues and change documents to expedite the creation of new change documents.

• Export a list of change documents into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet to perform further analysis or reporting.

• Automatically route change document notifications using Oracle Workflow.

• Change the owner of a single change document or multiple change documents at the same time.

• Track the ownership and status history of change documents, and view a history of assignments.

• Include the financial impact of change documents in project budgets and forecasts.

• Create and update cost planning lines with direct costs and supplier costs on a change request or a change order to estimate the functional impact changes in project scope.

• View the history of updates to cost planning lines for tracking negotiations with suppliers.

• Calculate cost budget impacts from cost planning lines.

• View cost budget impacts for a change document.

• Calculate revenue budget impacts from cost planning lines.

• Manually enter planned changes to revenue budget lines when revenue budgets are separate from cost budgets.

• View details of budget impacts from cost planning lines.

• Implement the financial impact of change orders in project budgets and forecasts.

• Generate a Potential Change Order (PCO) report.

• Create new financial tasks and send the task for approval if you do not have task approval authority.

  Any task that you create from a change document can only be used in the change document until an authorized user approves it.

Setup is required in order to use change management. For information on implementing change management, see: Issue and Change Management, Oracle Projects Implementation Guide.