02.2
Change, planned and unplanned
Are changes assessed before they are made, and does anyone examine changes that were made without being assessed?
What goes wrong without it
Change control functions well on changes that enter it. Its weakness is definitional: it can only govern what somebody classified as a change. The consequential ones are usually reclassified as clarifications, design development, or site instructions, and they are invisible to the register that was built to catch them. Asset management now treats planned change as a requirement in its own right, separately from change control, which is a distinction most organisations have not yet absorbed.
What to examine
- Sample instructions, technical queries and site decisions that did not enter the change register, and test whether any altered cost, programme or operating characteristics.
- Check whether the change assessment considers operating consequence, or only capital cost and time.
- Establish whether changes are assessed before implementation or ratified afterwards. Retrospective approval rates tell you what the control actually is.
- Confirm planned changes to the asset management system itself are assessed for risk and carried out in a planned manner, which the second edition requires separately.
Required by
- ISO 55001:2024, Clause 6.3, planning of changes, new in the second edition.
- ISO 55001:2024, Clause 8.2, control of change.
- ISO 21502:2020, Clause 7, change control practice.
Read the sources
- ISO 55001:2024, asset management system requirements2024 edition; read 2026-09-26.ISO’s product page: the publication details and ISO’s own summary of the standard, not the requirement text. The contents, foreword and introduction cited in this publication are taken from the standard’s preview pages hosted on the ANSI webstore, not from this page.
In the asset lifecycle method
The steps of the two methods that this domain examines.