Change management (engineering)

Change management in engineering, also called change request management, is the process of requesting, judging, planning, carrying out and reviewing changes to a system so that every change can be traced. It runs through six activities: identify a potential change, analyze the change request, evaluate it, plan it, implement it, and review and close it, carried out by four roles and recorded in a change log. It is closely tied to change control and configuration management and is used in software development and in manufacturing, where a fault reported in a product leads to a costed and approved change. In process plants it is known as management of change and is a safety requirement, as the Flixborough explosion showed.