Procedure for Change Management

What do you produce? What services do you provide? Are you a toll manufacturer?

One problem with basing your procedure on someone else's is that your organizations can be so different; if you make a process as complex as some others do, that may or may not be appropriate for your operations. A result could be personnel circumventing the process. Or, something important might be overlooked.

 

I agree with Jennifer. It may seem a good idea to see what others have done but it can be a deadly trap. You are making all kinds of assumptions when you ask for an example.

Why not get a cross functional team of management and supervisors who would be involved in making a change (depending on what you mean by "change") and facilitate a process mapping session (or 3). Make sure there's food. Make certain management support the need and will make time. Be sure to identify where the way you handled change previously didn't work effectively/efficiently.

 

Tell your plant management you need to get a team together (since you have never done this before and won't know, even if you get a template if you have got a good one) and because most organizations are affected by changes, let's collaborate and map the process so it suits ourselves.

 

Ask yourself as an interdisciplinary group what could go wrong if changes are made without anyone else knowing about them. There are so many potential examples, including but not limited to:

• Equipment installation and removal: besides the correct set up of infrastructure (plumbing, electrical safety, planned maintenance, or PM, electrostatic discharge if that applies, environmental concerns) there is a need to qualify the machine to operate satisfactorily and accurately in your quality management system. There are checklists for that. I once audited a facility with an entire room of new equipment, an entire new process; the project had been signed off and running, but not a single PM had been set up.
  
• Personnel changes: it seems impossible, but after a re-organization I went to a new process manager and said "Hello, it is time to schedule the ESD audit, and you're the new manager..." he blinked and said, "I am?" No one had told him, trained him or introduced him to the previous manager.
  
• Process changes, including in IT: they need to be planned, controlled and validated if they affect your quality management system. How will that be done? I once audited a site whose IT department had migrated them from Lotus Notes to Google Docs. No one has ever been able to describe to me (including them and many afterward) how one can retrieve a document from Google if it disappears overnight.

All of these things address risks. Your procedure need not be huge, but you do need organized methods to make sure important considerations are addressed.

I hope this helps!

 

Someone knows. Maybe you just had the wrong people.