98. Modeling Changes in MDM: Case Study of Irrigation Pipeline Project

It is a well-known fact that changes are unavoidable in any project. Also, these changes can happen anytime during the project tenure—for instance, either in the design or in the construction phase. Additionally, these changes are not identified and traced out as soon as they occur, and hence the impacts induced by these changes keeps progressing in mounds and heaps that it becomes NP-hard to bring the project back to as-planned state in due course of time. Change management is not a new topic and several researchers in the past had investigated and applied promising concepts in the construction industry. In this study, an attempt is made to model the project under multiple dimensions using a matrix-based methodology so that the incompleteness of the project data can be identified with minimal errors, and thereby enable a more realistic estimate of change prediction and impact assessment. Henceforth, the objective of this research study is to realistically capture the information flows in a project using the archived/documented sources and subsequently model the changes using a matrix approach. Here, Multiple Domain Matrix (MDM)-methodology has been chosen for modeling the project and for measuring the impact of the changes that is estimated along the schedule. This concept is demonstrated using the irrigation projects, and the results of this study were well received by the project experts.