SUP.10 Change Request Management
Involved in the challenges of Automotive SPICE, particularly change request management? Read on for a quick overview of key information on SUP.10, a key process from VDA Scope, including a video and our free white paper.
back to Automotive SPICEAutomotive SPICE® is a trademark of VDA QMC.
The Change Request Management process in Automotive SPICE® (also known as SUP.10) helps your organization to ensure that change requests are managed, tracked and implemented.
Change requests are required if your project scope or requirements are to be changed. Chargeable changes represent a chance to increase your project turnover and also your personnel capacity. Change requests are also very important for the customer. If you process change requests quickly and effectively, you will make your customers happy.
The following are the most important aspects of Change Request Management in Automotive SPICE®.
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The SUP.10 process under VDA Scope
Interested in finding out more about Change Request Management (SUP.10), the Automotive SPICE® process from VDA Scope? Our free white paper provides you with a summary of all key information, including an extract from our book on Automotive SPICE® Essentials – ideal reading for anyone new to the topic of process improvements.
A change request needs to be processed through all engineering processes without getting stuck. This involves dozens of people in different teams and locations. If you don't coordinate these people and track the status of change requests as they flow through the different steps, it will never work. A good strategy makes it clear to all involved how the workflow is, how progress is controlled and who is responsible for what.
Here is your solution for the contents of a great strategy.
- Define the categories of change requests you want to deal with, such as chargeable change requests, non-chargeable change requests, system level change requests, software requests and so on.
- Define your input channels - who can submit change requests.
- Define the tools to be used to process change requests.
- Define the status that change requests will have during processing.
- Define how and by whom progress will be tracked.
A typical solution is a CCB that stands for Change Control Board. This will help all people to do the right things. That is what counts!
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One problem I sometimes see is that projects start uncritically and immediately with the processing of change requests. Don’t do that! You may miss out on financial compensation or overburden your project team.
This is what I recommend
- In your CCB you check whether this change request is chargeable and, in this case, whether this person is allowed to submit this change request.
- Change requests often require a more detailed feasibility analysis by experts. If they are chargeable, you need to estimate the effort, prepare a quote and negotiate with the customer.
- You also need to check whether the desired implementation date is realistic or not. This avoids endangering the previously agreed releases and their contents.
In this way, you present yourself as a reliable partner for the customer and other stakeholders.
Implementing change requests increases the workload of your teams and requires careful planning and monitoring. Otherwise, either the change requests or the normal development tasks may hang or be late. Let’s have a look at how to get that solved. The point is that change requests and normal development tasks compete for resources and delivery dates.
If you don't have many buffers or can increase staff capacity, these are your options:
- Move features to a later release
- Move bug fixes and gain more capacity for the change request.
Both have the potential to annoy the customer and must therefore be negotiated with the customer in advance. Once this is resolved, treat the change requests like any other development task.
But one more thing: Automotive SPICE requires that change requests be traceable to all affected work products. This is easy to solve if you use a life cycle management tool that is linked to your configuration management tool. A change request leads to a series of development tasks and each development task is traceable to all resulting changes to work products.
That is Change Request Management in short.
If you follow these points
- you will implement powerful change request management functionality,
- you will keep control of your releases,
- and you will avoid having disappointed customers.
As part of our strategy to systematically improve development processes in the automotive electronics sector, we are also an official licensee of Automotive SPICE® – a trademark of the Association of the German Automotive Industry (VDA QMC).
- Using Automotive SPICE® to achieve the required maturity levels within your key processes in development
- Systematically improving existing workflows and methods
- Evaluating the status of your process improvements through formal assessments and gap analysis
- Fulfilling the requirements of Automotive SPICE® in harmony with SECURITY,FUNCTIONAL SAFETY and AGILE METHODS
- Training your staff and assessors
