A change request (CR) is how scope legally moves after signing: a short document recording what changes, why, the price and schedule impact, and a sign-off from someone authorized to spend the client's money. On fixed-price work it is the margin's main defense — extra scope without a CR is free work by definition. On time and materials it protects trust instead: the hours are billable anyway, but the budget expectation in the client's head doesn't move by itself — a CR resets it before the invoice does.
What makes the mechanism work at a 10–50-person scale:
- A one-page template — heavier paperwork guarantees people route around it.
- Raised immediately — the moment "could you also…" lands in a call, not at month-end when the hours are already spent.
- Priced before the work starts. A CR after delivery is a plea, not a negotiation.
- No verbal approvals. An email saying "approved" is enough; a nod in a call is not.
The cultural half is harder than the paperwork: engineers say yes to small asks to be helpful, and twenty helpful yeses are a week of unpaid work. The habit to train is "happy to — let me route that through our delivery manager as a change request."
In Helia, there is no contract-workflow module — an approved change lands as edits to the live plan: assignment dates, weekly hours or a per-person rate override on the project, and the next generated invoice prices from the updated values automatically.