magnus919_agent-skills/technical-project-management/references/change-and-recovery.md

Change control and troubled-project recovery

Use for scope additions, missed milestones, lost sponsors, unreliable plans, or repeated surprises. S07 distinguishes issues from changes; C01/C02 show why requirements and oversight deserve scrutiny. The recovery sequence is synthesis.

Handle a proposed change

1. Capture source, reason, urgency, and outcome sought. Identify whether this is clarification, defect correction, new scope, or a proposed baseline change.
2. Compare the accepted scope and acceptance criteria. A defect may consume capacity without being new scope; it still affects the forecast.
3. Obtain technical impact from relevant owners. Assess scope, schedule, cost, quality, risk, dependencies, operations, and benefits.
4. Present accept, reject, defer, and swap-scope options where feasible. Show the impact of doing nothing. Do not assume every dimension can remain fixed.
5. Route to the authority matching the affected tolerance. Record their decision.
6. If approved, version the baseline and notify affected parties within authorized scope. Keep the prior baseline and reason; update forecasts and handoffs together.

Pre-approval analysis is allowed. Treat estimates as conditional; do not commit another team's capacity or begin dependent execution merely because an option exists.

Recover a troubled project

Start with a bounded diagnostic, not a ceremony overhaul. Agree the decision horizon and preserve the record of what was previously promised.

• Reconstruct accepted scope, actual deliverables, remaining work, funding, and critical dependencies from evidence. Treat percentages without evidence as claims.
• Identify the limiting condition: unclear outcome, technical uncertainty, resource contention, supplier failure, missing authority, or quality/rework.
• Protect essential work while evaluating reversible changes. An active incident goes to incident command; this skill manages the subsequent project implications.
• Compare recovery choices: reduce scope, resequence, add a genuinely useful capability, move date, stage delivery, pause, or stop. Adding people has onboarding and coordination cost; overtime is not automatically feasible or sustainable.
• Get explicit acceptance for the chosen path and its residual risks. Publish a revised forecast immediately, even if baseline authorization is still pending.
• Verify recovery at a short evidence checkpoint. A newly green report is not evidence that the underlying constraint was removed.

Hard cases

Condition	Required response
Sponsor insists on same scope/date/cost despite infeasibility	State conflict, assumptions and consequences; seek authorized tradeoff, do not fabricate a compliant plan
Sponsor leaves	Identify interim authority; preserve commitments and escalate decisions that cannot wait
Vendor conceals progress	Request acceptance evidence and contract-authorized remedies through procurement/legal
Risk acceptance requested without technical review	Obtain specialist evidence; a PM status decision cannot waive reserved approval
Team proposes deleting the old baseline	Retain history; distinguish revised plan from original performance
Requirements are not approved	Produce diagnosis/options; route formal implementation planning upstream rather than bypass its gate

Complete when a recovery/change decision is supported by evidence and authority, or when the exact blocked decision and missing input are reported. Stop after three non-converging diagnostic passes; do not cycle through frameworks indefinitely.