University ITSM

Like many organizations, we have been trying to understand how project management and (service) change management interact. There are a few confusing components:

• Project management texts sometimes use the term "change management" when referring to "project scope change management" aka controlling the scope of a project.
• Projects need governance. Change management also facilitates governance decisions.
• Very early on, it can be hard to determine if something is a project or not.
• Projects have products or deliverables, and these deliverables often follow a change management process.

In our case, it took us a couple of tries to understand what would work best for us. We've ended up having all requests come in through our change management process. Depending on their complexity these requests may be sent for further analysis. This further analysis sometimes decides that the request should be a project.

Then that project follows our project governance process, which we call our "project gate review procedure." The project is approved through various gates. As the project identifies its products, each product is then sent through change management to be approved, communicated, built, scheduled, etc.

The project gate decision is primarily a resource decision. The change management process then facilitates communication between the project team and the rest of the department.