How Do You Manage Changes?

I was having an interesting discussion about the impact of changes and change requests today and I realized it was worth a short post.

As it turns out any change or change request has a time impact. There is the time to discuss the potential for a change, there is the time to discuss and outline the exact specifics of the change and there is the time to research the impact that a change might have. (Realize this is all before the change is actually made)

Needless to say this is not a problem if you build this type of time into your process and project. The key is that managing requests and responses to requests are just as important as managing the actual change.