The Change Request That Never Existed
- D.B Trench
- Jan 3
- 2 min read
Updated: Jan 20
PMTales.com — Behind the Gantt Chart
These things always start the same way: with reassurance.
By D.B. Trench
“We’re not changing scope,” said the Executive Sponsor, smiling in the way executives smile when they are absolutely changing scope.
It was a Tuesday. There was a deck. There was a timeline. There was even a slide titled “Scope: Finalized.”
Everyone nodded.
No one asked for the change request form.
That’s how the change request was born.
By Thursday, the “small clarification” had gained opinions.
By Friday, it had acquired dependencies.
By Monday, it had a name.
Not a real name. A soft name.
“The alignment tweak.”
No one could remember who coined it. It simply appeared one morning, fully formed, like a fog that smells faintly of PowerPoint.
The team adapted, because teams always do.
Developers adjusted estimates without changing the estimate.
Designers revised mockups without revising the timeline.
Testers added cases without adding time.
And the Project Manager — you know this one — updated the plan without updating the plan.
Somewhere around Sprint Three, the creature began to follow the project home.
Not physically.
Not visibly.
It waited in inboxes. It slept inside meeting invites. It nested in phrases like “while you’re in there…” and “it shouldn’t take long.”
It fed exclusively on goodwill.
The PM noticed it first.
They always do.
It showed up as a strange tension during stand-ups.
As a calendar that felt heavier than usual.
As the sense that progress was happening, but arrival was quietly moving away.
They considered raising it.
They almost did — right after the Steering Committee meeting where everyone said things were “tracking well, considering.”
So they waited.
Professionally.
The creature loved that.
It grew legs.
By the time the words “Do we need to formalize this?” finally surfaced, the room went quiet.
The Executive Sponsor frowned — not angrily, just… thoughtfully.
“Well,” they said, “we’re already doing it.”
The creature smiled for the first time.
That was the moment.
The moment the change request stopped being a request.
It didn’t get approved.
It didn’t get rejected.
It didn’t even get logged.
It simply became history.
And history, as every PM knows, is impossible to roll back.
The project did launch.
Of course it did.
There was applause.
There were thank-you emails.
There was even a line about “great teamwork under pressure.”
No one mentioned the creature.
It followed the PM anyway.
Onto the next project. Into the next kickoff. Hovering patiently behind the phrase:
“We’ll manage it.”
Filed under: things that quietly run projects.
If this story felt familiar, the PMTales Creature Cards exist for a reason.
They’re a visual, printable set PMs use to recognize (and name) the patterns everyone sees — but no one writes down.
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