Measures of success for changes

A colleague asks:

Is it a compliance risk to extend timelines on a change control?

I want to take a step back to an important fundamental of change management to answer this question. All changes are done to realize strategic purposes; a good change management system is all about accelerating change. From the big transformations to the emergency changes to keep product being made each and every change has a strategic goal.

From this alignment to the strategy, each change has success metrics. Success metrics include economic, quality, technical and organization (among others) and they drive the how and the when of our change.

For example, a change driven by a CAPA to prevent reoccurrence will potentially have a different timeline than a change tied to a strategic goal to leverage a new way of working. But both have timelines driven by strategic to the tactical needs, usually filtered through a risk based prioritization tool.

And sometimes these change. The compliance aspect is not so much did you extend, it’s did you know what was happening with the change control in enough time to influence it in such a way to assure meeting the how.

The KPIs and other measures built into your system should monitor and ensure your changes reach the intended benefits.

To return to the original question. Unlike deviations/conformances where there is a specific requirements to complete in a timely way, and CAPAs where the root cause needs to be dealt with as soon as possible, change controls have their own internal timeline based on the drivers (which may be a CAPA). Extensions are not bad in a specific one-by-one change control approach. Instead they are indicative of larger troubles in the system and should be dealt with holistically to ensure you get the maximum benefit from your changes in the best possible time.