Change Control

13th April 2017

Change is all around us and it has the potential to utterly disrupt your business – just ask the people who had photographic film developing businesses. Moreover change can cause loss of life.

It follows then that the identification and management of change should be a core process for most businesses right? Well it is still very surprising to discover that a lot of companies – big and small – don’t to “change” very well at all.

Change comes in a number of forms, physical change to your product through component obsolescence or altered material specification, organisational change either within your or one of your suppliers companies. So how do you know what the effects of change event may be? In a previous blog we’ve looked at risk evaluation, and that’s a good place to start. We use risk evaluation processes to get a handle on the potential severity of the hazards created by the change and put in place appropriate control measures. It is also vital to define when the change has finished and you are back to a “steady state”.

Organisational change may require you to evaluate roles and responsibilities to ensure that no key activities get lost of overlooked  – particularly if you are involved in providing a safety critical service.

An effective change management process will almost certainly touch on most of your existing management processes and is quite often best managed by a specific project group or change management specialist. These people will have dealt with change many times and will be aware of the many traps that the uninitiated can fall into.

Failure to manage change or indeed demanding effective change control by your suppliers can have serious consequences, for a more detailed view of how “change events” can be identified and controlled in your business ask us, and we’ll run you through it.