- Welcome to Module 11 Part 4. This is the final part of the Change theme. And here we're going to look at options analysis. And what we mean by options analysis is really that weighing up of what to do if we have an issue, or a change request, or something identified a faulty product, what are we going to do? So, on the plus side, we've gotta think about if we're gonna take action and make this change, What is the advantage to be gained against the impact of implementing it? So it, you know, cost, it might take time, et cetera. So, we've got to weigh this up. And so, let's have a look at the things, in terms of advantage gained, that we might be thinking about. Will this change give us improved quality or scope? Got to think about that. It might be a definite extra benefit for the project, if we do this. So, that might be a really big advantage for going for it. Will this change request bring more benefit? So, yeah, sort of goes on from the next one ... goes on from the previous one, I'm sorry. And will there be reduced cost, time, or risk if we go for it and approve this change request? So, those are the potential advantages of approving a change request. But, what are the impacts if we do it? Is there more risk involved from carrying out this option? And how much will it cost, how much will it delay us? So, those are the big things that we're thinking about. So, for every issue, particular change requests, we're weighing things up, what do we do? Really, we're looking for cost effectiveness But we can't discount the fact that by going and making these changes that there could be definitely more benefit. So, they might well affect our business case off of this. There are some other management products I need to tell you about us well before I can finish this theme. The issue reports I mentioned when we went through the change control procedure. And we'll see it just more formally here. In A 13, Appendix A you'll find it. And here, they suggest it should contain the description, impact assessment and recommendations for a change, off-specification or a problem, or concern. And we're only going to create an issue report for issues that need to be handled formally. There may be a number of recipients for this issue report. It may be just going up to the board, but it might be going outside. And it really is a way for the project manager to inform everybody of the issue. And then, hopefully, they'll get back some advice. Another management product that I need to tell you about are the configuration item records. It's unlikely we're just gonna have one. A configuration item record is a record of one item that we might need to track. And to quote them, it's, "A record "that describes the status, version and variant "of a configuration item, and relationships between them." And we make one for each item that we need to track or control, or each item that is base lined or agreed. Some projects, and your projects might not be complex enough to need this, but some projects, particularly manufacturing projects, so if we're making our car, every single nut and bolt and rivet is going to be tracked. We need to know where it is, who's responsible for it, we need to know if there's any issues, or risks associated with it, and the best place to record that is in one central, and I'll just say, database for now, 'cause often they are either very complex spreadsheets, or specially made databases. But, actually, it might be an easier just to think about it is as a spreadsheet. Each row will record a configuration item. So, if you've got 50 items that you want to track then you will have 50 rows in your spreadsheet. And we might want to track the status of it, so we'll have a column for status. We might want to track location, we might want to track producer name, we might want to track any issues and risks associated. So, we might have just links to our issue register or risk register there, so configuration item records in some projects are huge, they're very powerful databases. And everything is tracked and, of course, this is a big overhead for us, in terms of project support resource, because somebody needs to keep these updated, and it's an administrative task so we need to have some project support here to keep these configuration item records updated. But, if they are updated and maintained, they're very useful, if there are any issues, let's say, a staff member's gone sick we would like to know what they're working on. So, why don't we have a column there of, you know, we've got that producer column if we've been recording the names of our team members who are working on our products, we can filter that spreadsheet just to show the name of our sick team member and then it is revealed what they're working on and the project manager can then make a decision about how serious this issue actually is. That filtering is, effectively, a product status account. An account of the status of a group of products. In this case, products made by our poor ill team member. So, a product status account is all the information. Could be an account of all the products in our spreadsheet. Or, it could be a group of them, you know, filtered entries in our spreadsheet. So, the product status account is used to provide information about the state of products within defined limits. Which, you know, if you print out the whole spreadsheet that's all our products we could just print out the items that are being made in stage one. Or that are still a work in progress. You decide what you want to store in your configuration item records when you create your change control approach, if you want to. And, then, some projects they're quite small, they're not very complex, everybody kind of knows the status of all the products that we're working on, and so we might not necessarily need a very complex spreadsheet for this. But, if you're going to have one, we need to keep it updated and you can then use it, it's very useful for reporting stage progress. And it helps the project manager keep track of our progress within the stage plan. So, I think that's it, that's all our additional management products and that brings us to the end of the change theme.