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Adapting to and Controlling Schedule Changes
Project Management · Chapter 9: Project Monitoring, Control, and Performance ManagementSection 9.7 · lesson 61 of 7312 min · free with a free account
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In this lesson
Assess a delay's real impact, choose a response, and route approval correctly.
- Classify schedule changes as internal, external or client-driven
- Calculate how much of a delay reaches the finish using float
- Compare re-sequencing, crashing, fast tracking and re-baselining as responses
- Apply governance thresholds to decide who must approve a schedule change
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Transcript
Everything said in the video, section by section (1,746 words). Read along, or search it.
Opening Question
Glass Panels Arriving Five Days Late
Priya's phone rings. It's the glass supplier for the Riverside clinic's fit-out: the glazed panels for the reception partitions will arrive five days late. As always, the figures are made up. Will the clinic now open five days late? What should Priya do about it? And whose agreement does she need? A schedule change is any event or decision that moves start or finish dates, away from the approved plan: a late delivery, a low estimate, a customer who reorders the work. Changes like this are normal. What matters is that each one is noticed early, assessed honestly, answered deliberately, approved by the right person, and recorded.
Sources of Change
Internal, External and Client-Driven Causes
The source tells you how much the team could have prevented. An internal source arises inside the organization: an estimate that was too low, rework after a failed check, or a person moved to other work. An external source is outside the team's control, though it can often be planned for: a supplier delay, a new regulatory requirement, or weather that stops a crane. A client-driven source comes from the customer or sponsor, like a layout approval that takes eleven days instead of five. A client request that changes what's delivered, not just when, is a scope change. It has its own process.
Impact Assessment
Critical Path, Float, Resources and Cost
Before choosing any response, Priya does an impact assessment: a structured check of what the change does to the rest of the plan. It checks four effects. The critical path, where a delay moves the finish day for day. Float, which shows how much of a delay reaches the finish. Resources, since a response may collide with other commitments. And cost, including the cost of finishing late. Here's the fit-out, in working days. Preparing the shell, four days. Then framing the partitions, eight, and electrical rough-in, six, followed by cabling, five. The glass has a ten-day lead time from the order. Installing the glazed panels takes ten days, after framing and the glass. Final fit-out, four days, comes last. The critical path runs shell, framing, glazing, fit-out: four plus eight plus ten plus four, finishing on day twenty-six. Rough-in and cabling have seven days of float. The glass has two.
Worked Example
Delay Minus Float Reaches the Finish
Now the news. The glass lead time becomes fifteen days. The finish slips by the delay minus the float: five minus two, three days. Recalculating, glazing runs from day fifteen to twenty-five, and fit-out ends on day twenty-nine. Compare an overrun elsewhere. If cabling ran nine days over, it would use its seven days of float, and push the finish two days, to day twenty-eight. So a late-delivery notice can't be judged without the float figures. Five days late on the supplier's letter is three days late for the clinic.
Quick Check
A Cabling Overrun Within Its Float
Quick check. Suppose the glass had come on time, but cabling, with its seven days of float, runs six days over. When does the fit-out finish? Pause, and decide. Still day twenty-six. Six days of delay fit inside seven days of float, so none of it reaches the finish. Day thirty-two adds the whole overrun to the finish, as if cabling were critical. It isn't, though it now has only one day of float left.
Change Process
Five Steps for Every Schedule Change
Applied to the schedule, the change process has five steps. A change request states what has changed. The impact is assessed and the responses costed. A decision is made by whoever has authority for a change that size. Then a baseline decision: keep the approved plan as the yardstick and only update the forecast, or replace it with a new baseline. Finally, the outcome is communicated to everyone whose work depends on the dates, and the change log is updated. Every delay goes through the same steps. Skipping the assessment, or the threshold test, is how unrecorded and unauthorized changes happen.
Response One
Re-sequencing Without Added Resources
Three kinds of response. The first is re-sequencing: changing the order or logic of the remaining work, so time lost in one place is recovered in another, with no added resources. Plans often hold dependencies drawn for convenience. Sam points out that half of the final fit-out, flooring and fixtures in the zones without glass, needs only the partitions and the cabling. So Priya splits it. The first half, two days, runs from day fifteen to seventeen, while the glazing goes on. The second half, final fit and inspection, ends on day twenty-seven. That recovers two of the three lost days, for nothing. The risk is an unrecorded dependency: work done early that has to be redone. Only dependencies that aren't technically necessary can go.
Response Two
Crashing Versus Fast Tracking
The second response is compression: shortening the remaining schedule without changing the scope. Crashing adds resources to critical activities. Fast tracking overlaps work planned in sequence. Crash cost is the cost per day recovered, times the days recovered. A second glazing crew at six hundred a day, for three days, costs eighteen hundred, and brings the finish back to day twenty-six. Crashing only helps on critical work. Extra crews bring diminishing returns as people crowd each other, and the critical path can shift: after this crash, framing has three days of float. Fast tracking would start the fit-out two days before glazing ends, finishing on day twenty-seven, with no extra crew. But one day of rework would make it day twenty-eight. Crashing turns money into time, at a predictable cost. Fast tracking turns risk into time, and its cost appears only if the risk occurs.
Response Three
Forecast Update or New Baseline
The third response is re-baselining: replacing the approved baseline with a new one. A forecast update is different: it moves the predicted finish, and leaves the baseline alone. Record day twenty-nine as a forecast, and the baseline still says day twenty-six: a three-day variance. Re-baseline to day twenty-nine, and the visible variance drops to zero. That's serious. It removes the yardstick unless the old baseline is kept. It can make a project look healthy by moving the target. And it changes a commitment, so it's normally decided above the project manager. When is re-baselining legitimate? One view: the baseline is an accountability commitment, reset rarely, say after an approved scope change. A baseline reset whenever work slips never shows poor performance. The other view: the baseline is a working plan. One overtaken by events has managers chasing variance they can't recover, so reset promptly and keep the history. Evidence on which practice hides more problems is limited and mixed. And what a baseline is for is a question of values. No side is taken here.
Trend Analysis
Reading Schedule Variance Across Periods
How do you see a schedule problem growing? Schedule variance, earned value minus planned value, is one snapshot. Its trend, the pattern across reporting periods, shows whether things are worsening or recovering. In one series, in thousands of dollars, the variance goes zero, minus two, minus five, minus nine, minus fourteen. The gap is growing, and growing faster. Start the impact assessment now. In another, it goes minus nine, minus seven, minus six, minus four, minus two. It's recovering, but minus two is still not back on plan. Two cautions. Schedule variance is in value, not days, so non-critical work running ahead can hide a late critical path. And it drifts toward zero near the end. Read it beside the critical-path forecast.
Approval Thresholds
Who Approves Which Size of Change
Who approves? Governance thresholds are limits, agreed in advance, on the size of a change, deciding who has authority. They differ between organizations. Willowbrook's rule has two tests. Priya may approve up to three days of finish change, and up to a thousand dollars of added cost. Helen, as sponsor, up to ten days and five thousand. Beyond that, the board. The approver is the higher of the two tests, and any re-baseline needs at least the sponsor. Three days and twelve hundred dollars passes the days test at Priya's level, but the cost test at Helen's: so Helen approves. Splitting one change into pieces that each stay under a limit defeats the rule, so the whole change is assessed. And each decision goes in a change record: the request, the assessment, the options, the decision, the approver, the date, and the effect on baseline and forecast.
Comparing Options
Costing Each Response to the Glass Delay
Back to the glass. Every day past day twenty-six costs two hundred fifty dollars in supervision and equipment hire. Doing nothing finishes on day twenty-nine: seven hundred fifty dollars. Re-sequencing gives day twenty-seven: two hundred fifty. Fast tracking also gives twenty-seven, or twenty-eight and five hundred with a day of rework. Crashing three days holds day twenty-six, for eighteen hundred. Re-baselining to day twenty-nine costs the same seven hundred fifty as doing nothing, because it recovers no time. It only moves the yardstick, and it needs Helen. Or combine them. Re-sequencing recovers two days, and crashing glazing by one day, for six hundred, recovers the third. Glazing ends on day twenty-four, and the finish holds at day twenty-six.
Quick Check
Approving a Late Lab Analyzer Package
Quick check, with Willowbrook's rule. The lab analyzer for Riverside, on the critical path with no float, will arrive three weeks late: fifteen working days. Re-sequencing saves four days. A second installation shift saves six more, at seven hundred dollars a day. Priya submits both as one package. Who must approve it? Pause, and decide. Helen, the sponsor. The package leaves a slip of fifteen, minus four, minus six: five days. And six times seven hundred is forty-two hundred dollars. Five days and forty-two hundred are both above Priya's limits, and below the board's. The board would be needed for re-sequencing alone, which leaves an eleven-day slip.
Case Resolved
Re-sequence Plus a One-Day Crash
Back to the glass panels. Before choosing, Priya checks with Sam that the zones without glass hide no dependency that would force rework. They don't. So she takes the combination: re-sequence the fit-out and crash glazing by one day. The finish holds at day twenty-six, and the added cost is six hundred dollars. Zero days and six hundred dollars sit inside her own limits. She raises one change request for the whole response, logs the change record, and tells everyone whose dates move. Helen hears about it in the next report, as a decision already made within authority. The baseline stays at day twenty-six. Whether that date was worth six hundred dollars depends on what it's worth to the clinic.
Key Takeaways
Assess, Respond, Approve and Record
To recap: every schedule change has a source, internal, external, or client-driven. Assess its impact first. The slip that reaches the finish is the delay minus the float. Then respond: re-sequence, compress by crashing or fast tracking, or, rarely, re-baseline. Read schedule variance as a trend. And let the agreed thresholds decide who approves, with every decision in the change record.
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About Adapting to and Controlling Schedule Changes
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When is re-baselining a project schedule appropriate?
How do approval thresholds decide who signs off a schedule change?
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