At this point you have raised your Draft Proposal, and the next stop is the Change Sub Committee. This third article in our four-part series on the Development Stage explores the role of the Change Sub-Committee. But what is the purpose of this group? Is this whole stage just additional steps for no benefit? Where does the proposal go next? If you’re asking these questions, read on…
The Change Sub Committee provides oversight of the Development Stage of the Modification Process. Ensuring Draft Proposals have clear problem statements is at the heart of what they do. Their role is to review all new Draft Proposals and agree whether the problem statement is clear enough to progress into the next stage of the process as a Modification Proposal or whether further development is needed first. They will also act as a sounding board for you, to see how well received your proposal would be by your peers and how likely it is to succeed.
In a nutshell, the three main things the Change Sub-Committee will ultimately need to assess are:
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- The problem that has been raised;
- The impacts that this issue is having, including the scale of the issue and the impacts on Parties of doing nothing; and
- The part(s) of the SEC that this issue relates to.
To support the Change Sub-Committee in making this assessment, we will be working to fully understand the issue and gather the required information, noting the key questions in the first article. This will include:
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- Engaging with other Sub-Committees;
- Liaising directly with other Parties likely to be affected;
- Engaging with the DCC;
- Where beneficial, opening up the problem statement to wider comment by Parties; and
- Where needed, convening a workshop for Parties to gather and discuss the issue.
If you’re thinking this will all take a lot of time, please note this whole process is scalable to the needs of individual proposals. This work could be done in days or it could require months – it all depends on the complexity of the issue.
Once we have gathered all of the information needed and all the views received, we will produce a report for the Change Sub-Committee that presents the problem statement, the impacts of this issue, and the context of this within the SEC. Once the Change Sub-Committee is happy with this, this report will essentially act as the ‘proposal form’ for a full modification.
When the Change Sub-Committee believes the problem has been fully assessed and understood, it’s time to progress it into the next part of the process – that will be the subject of the final part in this series.