The customer/client wants to make a major change in the project scope when project is mostly complete. What should the project manager do?

You can ask the customer to raise an Engineering Change Request or Change Management Request according to the nature of project. It can be a lead to revise the quotation as well as the scope of project

If the project is mostly, complete

You can have an agreement that 

1- This will be treated as change request that will be done but needs to go through change requests process & which is of course billable

2- Convince him that this will be treated as one project delivered in2 phases and that phase1 needs to be deployed and have a soft launch so that the problems found during soft launch are fixed within the scope of phases2.

By this you will '

1 -Not loose money.

2-Deliver the current scope with its original plan.

3-Give the customer what he wants (even if it is in2 phases)

4- Minimize the maintenance effort, as soft launch will show you some weakness points

Goodmorning,

for this case, the evaluation that the PM has to do are many:

- what is the economical situation of the company (supplier);

- what is the budget available for an eventual scope modifcation (supplier);

- in case of budget reduction due to lower scope (from customer), what consequences this action will have to the company balance;- what is the availability of the personnel-machinery to fulfill an eventual agreement;

- what is the availability of the customer to negociate the terms of the scope modification;

- what is the availability of the customer to increase (if needed) the budget for the project;

When all this evaluations are done, a confront wih the comany administration and lawyers, is always a good way forward to prepare an "attack plan" and proceed on what decided.

Is a good thing to take in consideration always what could be the worst case scenario, to be prepared for the situation that no one wants to face.

Is very important, on the other hand, to focus on the real situation of the agreements, company-customer relations, economical situation of both parties, short-long term plans.

regards