Dear Kong Yip Li,
You are asking an interesting question. It’s interesting because ‘production’ may mean 2 different things:
1) The process of production, i.e. manufacturing, producing the product of the project.
2) The production environment of the customer, sometimes called ‘live system’ or ‘live environment’.
In the first meaning, when the project is still on-going and the defect was detected by the vendor (before the customer's acceptance), a change request is absolutely required to perform defect repair activity (not a corrective action, unless the process of table manufacturing is out of control and you need to apply corrective action to fix the process itself).
In the second meaning, the table was released to the customer production environment after it was accepted by the customer. The project is closed, everybody is happy. In this case, if the table got broken during the customer use, there is no project to submit a change request to. Therefore, if there was a maintenance and support agreement between the vendor and the customer, the customer can go to the vendor to request support. So from the vendor perspective, it’s an operation, not a project (remember Operations vs Project Management, PMBOK® Guide, Fifth Edition, page 12?). Then the vendor does whatever the agreement says: fixes the table, replaces the table, etc. If there is no such agreement, then nothing can be done: the customer absorbs the issue.
But all the above is explained at a very high level. Correct answer to each question will heavily depend on the context in which the question is asked, on the wording of the question, the situation, and so on.
Hope it helps.
Regards,
Stan Po, MBA, PMP, PMI-ACP, CSM, CIPP
Product and Program Manager
OSP International LLC
