So, you have made the right adjustments, asked all of the questions, and now find yourself with a significant change. In this case, it is a tradeoff between time and cost.

To complete the story, the project manager has the following conversation with the sponsor:

PROJECT MANAGER: The walls for the house were not completed on time.

We now have a decision to make. I have talked with the painting contractor and they can get another resource, but it is more expensive. We can either finish the project five days late, or spend the additional money needed to complete the project on time. Which would you prefer?

SPONSOR: I am on a really tight budget, so let's finish five days late.

Some of you are chuckling as you are reading this, thinking that your project sponsor would say, “Finish it on time and for the cost provided!” Although there are many sponsors like that, we deal with facts and reality. It is what it is. In this story, if the project manager didn't uncover the additional cost by asking all of the right questions, then they would have saved time but spent more money. This is exactly what the sponsor did not want.

Change is an interesting phenomenon. Many consultants love change because it generally means more dollars and more revenue. But there is a responsibility involved in change. Change for the sake of change can mean that the intended result of the project is diminished. For example, if you are painting your house and you hire a company to perform the job, there is a fee associated. When they have finished the first coat, you realize that you do not like the overall color, so you ask them to paint a different color. There is a fee associated with that. Ten coats of paint later, you are satisfied with the color. The outside person looking at your house sees one color. A real estate broker sees one color. You see one color, but the cost is ten times the amount intended, so the value of repainting your house diminished greatly.

It is important that when you communicate a change, you are giving an unbiased approach. A more responsible action by the painting contractor would have been to paint several small, inconspicuous squares of different colors to inspect the overall color, paint one side of the house and check to see if it is acceptable, then complete the painting of the house. The cost would be significantly less and the customer would not have diminished the value of the work. Instead, the contractor just went out and painted the whole house each time, driving up the overall cost.

When you communicate a change, make sure you are providing the whole story so that everyone understands why the change was made, the positives and negatives of the change, and what other alternatives were suggested.