A change order is a written, agreed change to a project's scope, price or schedule. It turns a casual request into a decision both sides signed off on, which is what stops it turning into an argument later.
What a change order should contain
It can be a short document - what matters is that all five of these are explicit and agreed in writing.
- What is changing
- The specific addition, removal or alteration, described the way the original scope was described.
- Why
- What was learned or requested. This is what makes it reviewable rather than arbitrary.
- Commercial effect
- Cost, or the explicit statement that there is none.
- Schedule effect
- The new date, or what gets displaced to hold the old one. "No impact" on a fully booked plan is rarely true.
- Approval
- Who agreed, and when.
Why raising one early is easier than it feels
The reluctance is understandable: a change order feels like an argument, and the addition usually looks small. But the same conversation gets harder every week it is postponed, because the work may already be half-done and the client has by then assumed it was included. Raised the week it comes up, it reads as diligence. Raised at handover, it reads as a bill nobody agreed to.
The dependency nobody plans for
A change order needs a baseline to change. If the original scope was never written down precisely - especially its exclusions - the conversation degrades into two recollections, and the party with more at stake concedes. Which is why the exclusions section of the original agreement does more work than the change-order process itself.
Frequently asked questions
Do small changes need a change order?
Not each one formally, but they should all be recorded somewhere. The damage comes from a dozen unrecorded small changes, not from one large recorded one.
What if the client refuses to sign?
Then you have discovered a disagreement about scope while there is still time to resolve it, which is better than discovering it at the end. The written record of the request is itself useful.
How Spectr helps
Catch scope creep while you can still do something about it
Out-of-scope work flagged as it comes up, with a decision recorded on each one
Related terms
Spend less of the week on documents
Spectr drafts the spec, the requirement document and the stories from your meetings. You review and approve.
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