Change Requests

A change request is a formal proposal to modify an approved project baseline (scope, schedule, budget, and so on). It can be submitted by stakeholders, team members, clients, or vendors when new needs or risks arise. The request typically includes a description of the proposed change, its reason, and an initial impact assessment. After submission, the request is reviewed through a change management process to evaluate its impact on cost, timeline, quality, and risk.

Use change requests to:

• Assess Impact: Evaluate how proposed changes affect the project’s scope, schedule, budget, quality, and risk.
• Track Reviews and Approvals: Maintain an audit trail of stakeholder decisions to ensure alignment on approved and rejected changes. Tracking at the impact line level enables selective approval and consolidation of specific impacts into a change order. If tracking is done only at the change request level, approving the change request approves all associated impact lines, and consolidation includes all lines.
• Consolidate into Change Orders: Combine one or more approved change requests (or selected impact lines) into a change order to update project plans and budgets while reducing administrative effort.

You can configure change requests to align with your business process by defining and managing change request reasons so users can categorize changes consistently, and by configuring change request statuses to reflect your organization’s review and approval lifecycle.

Here's a table that summarizes the change request stages and statuses, along with a short description of each and the actions available.

Change Request Status	Description	Available Actions
New	Initial draft status where the change request is created and refined prior to submission.	Edit change request (all fields); add, edit, or delete impact lines; submit change request
Submitted	Submitted for approval processing; only limited updates are allowed while in this status.	Update impact line level status; add comments
Approved	Approved and locked down to preserve the approved record; only comments can be updated.	Add comments
Closed/Canceled	End state (completed or terminated); record is read-only.	None

Integration specialists can use public business events to track change request status and priority changes. You can use these events to trigger integrations or custom orchestration, such as creating a corresponding change order when a project change request moves to Approved.

The Project Management – Change Management Real Time subject area allows you to monitor metrics such as approval status, financial impact and processing times across multiple dimensions, including project, change reasons, and priority. Use the dimensions in the Task folder to report on impacts to existing tasks. For reporting scope impacts related to newly added tasks, use the dimensions in the Change Request New Task folder.