Towards an engineering change management maturity grid

Engineering changes are inevitable, and their effective management (ECM) is essential in order for companies to sustain their competitiveness. The challenges in industry on ensuring an efficient ECM have been evident for years. The literature on ECM, however, falls short in giving comprehensive guidance for improvement. This article takes the first steps in developing a holistic maturity framework that is designed to guide improvement effort within ECM. The result of the development, an ECM maturity grid, is presented. The grid is a multilevel framework, and offers maturity assessment on a five-level scale, within five overall process areas, and 26 sub-process areas. A design science approach, aligned with a process for developing maturity grids, is followed to ensure a structured and deliberate approach. The paper contributes furthermore with a comprehensive overview of the critical success factors for an efficient ECM, which is used as basis for identifying the process areas of the maturity grid. Based on an industrial validation by 14 domain experts, it is concluded that the ECM maturity grid offers a valuable basis for providing targeted guidance on how to achieve an efficient ECM. Further development is, however, needed, for the grid to support maturity assessment.

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