Engineering change management impact on project success within a South African petrochemical company

M.Ing. (Engineering Management)Abstract: Engineering changes are greatly influenced by the evolving technology and as a result customers’ requirements are continuously changing. There is therefore, a need to effectively manage these changes as they arise. This research paper focuses mainly on the engineering change management (ECM) impact on project success within petrochemical industry. Based on the fact that changes are inevitable, it is crucial to find out if these changes are managed properly in a project or not and what will be the impact thereof. This prompted the following research questions: What is the impact of ECM in relation to project cost? What is the impact of ECM in relation to project schedule? What is the impact of ECM in relation to project quality? The literature review conducted in this paper discusses various ECM frameworks and the knowledge obtained assisted in hypotheses formulation. These hypotheses were then tested by means of questionnaires on experienced personnel working with the ECM on a daily basis. The results obtained revealed that proper ECM in a project will decrease the overall project cost and reduce overall project schedule. However, based on the knowledge of the people who participated in the survey, there is no correlation between ECM and project quality