You Can't Avoid Change

Customers change their minds. Competitors zig instead of zagging. Technology advances. Change is constant, and prohibiting it on projects does not work.

In Flexible Product Development, Preston Smith asks, “Is a frozen specification simply fiction?” Citing thirteen years of data collection by Donald Reinertsen at Cal Tech, Smith concludes, “It is not that specifications seldom remain constant during development; it is that they never do. The concept of frozen requirements is a complete fiction in the real world.” [Smith, p. 13]

You can’t prevent changes to your projects, but allowing rampant uncontrolled change dooms projects. Is there solution to this dilemma?

Make Change Valuable

In The New Project Management, J. Davidson Frame points out that change can be valuable. [Frame, p. 48] Companies that react flexibly and quickly can take advantage of market shifts, new technologies, and changing customer desires, giving them an advantage over their slower, less flexible competitors.

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