Change control without the bureaucracy. Five fields per change, an approval policy you set at kickoff, and a monthly audit that catches what slipped past.
Five fields per change request: ID, description, impact, decision, decision date. One row per change. No 10-page CR forms. The discipline is in the structure, not the ceremony.
Three tiers (PM-approves, sponsor-approves, steering-committee-approves) keyed to impact thresholds. Set the thresholds at kickoff, not mid-program. Retrofitting an approval policy during a scope fight never goes well.
Auto-view that totals the impact of all approved changes against the original scope. Surfaces the slow accumulation that turns programs into different programs without anyone noticing.
The exact words for approving a change with conditions, rejecting one without burning the relationship, and recovering when a change slipped past the policy.
The 5-field discipline, three failure modes with fixes, the 24-hour SLA on approvals, and the monthly cadence that keeps the log alive.
One purchase, yours to keep. Use it on every program, customize for your team. Works in Excel and Google Sheets.
Most PMs reach for a 10-page change request form, get tired, and stop logging. Three months in, scope has crept by 30%, nobody can name when each piece was added, and the program is delivering against a target nobody quite remembers agreeing to. The audit comes. The team reconstructs the timeline. Everyone agrees this was avoidable.
It was. The problem was the form, not the discipline. A change log that takes ten minutes per row is a change log that does not get filled out. A change log that takes ninety seconds per row is one the team will actually keep.
"The goal isn't to eliminate change. The goal is to make sure every change has a paper trail, an owner, and a decision on record."
This template is built around five fields, a 24-hour approval SLA, and a monthly audit that catches what slipped past. It is not a ticketing system. It is the discipline that keeps a program from drifting into a different program without anyone noticing.
Five fields. Ninety seconds per row. The discipline is in keeping it short enough that the team will actually fill it out.
The most common scope-control failure is not a missing log entry. It is a change that should have escalated and didn't, because the policy wasn't clear at kickoff and nobody wanted to be the one to slow things down. The template fixes this with three tiers:
Set the numbers at kickoff. They will feel arbitrary in the moment. They will be invaluable in month four when somebody is pushing for a change that ought to escalate.