Raise and adjudicate a change request

A change request is the formal mechanism to move locked material — a locked budget or schedule baseline, or an approved business case. This guide covers raising a change, adjudicating it, and what happens after approval. Approved changes roll up as variations against the baseline, which stays intact.

Before you start

• You need edit rights on the project.
• You name an approver, and only that person can approve or reject.
• Tollgate records separation of duties rather than enforcing it: a self-approved stamp marks an approver deciding their own change.
• A change request is the only way to move a baseline you locked when baselining work packages.

Once a baseline locks, an ordinary work-package save cannot overwrite it. The locked value stands regardless of what the save carries. Forecast and actual stay editable. The baseline does not.

Raise a change

1. Open the project’s Tollgate tab and select Changes.
2. Choose Request a change (the add action on the register).
3. Describe the change and its Reason.
4. Select the Dimensions affected — Scope, Budget, Schedule, Quality, or Other.
5. Enter the impact where relevant — Impact — budget ($) and Impact — schedule (days).
6. Name the Approver.
7. Choose Request change. The change enters the register as Proposed and surfaces on Decisions needed on Investment Health.

Adjudicate the change

The named approver resolves it:

1. Open Changes and find the proposed change.
2. Choose Approve or Reject.
3. Add a comment — required on Reject.
4. Confirm.

While the change is still Proposed, the person who raised it can Edit or Withdraw it from the same row.

How an approved change affects the baseline

• Tollgate never overwrites the baseline. It records an approved change as a variation — the delta against the locked baseline.
• Tollgate derives the live figure as baseline + the sum of approved variations and shows both side by side.
• The count of approved changes this reporting period feeds the Scope RAG (red/amber/green) on Investment Health.

Note

This keeps the reported budget honest: the original commitment stays on the record, and every movement away from it is an explicit, adjudicated variation.

Approved, and then applied

Approving a change is not always the same act as applying it, so the register reports both. Under the Approved status you’ll see one of these notes:

Note	What it means
Applied	Nothing more to do: approval applies a change carrying only a Budget or Schedule delta — the variation roll-up is the application.
Awaiting application	Approval authorised a modification that is yet to land. Any change touching Scope, Quality or Other — the prose rather than the numbers — sits here until the thing it authorised happens.
Applied in BC v2	The authorised amendment landed, and the change records where: this one enabled version 2 of the business case.

A change that carries both a delta and an amendment — “add $50k and rewrite the scope” — reads Awaiting application until its amendment half lands. The money still moved at approval.

Note

The application note is evidence. Tollgate stamps it when the authorised change lands. Nobody can mark a change applied by hand. That makes “was this amendment authorised, and by what?” a lookup rather than an argument about timestamps.

Related

• Add and baseline work packages.
• Record a decision.
• Return, reopen, or amend a business case — how an approved change request enables an amendment.