Which action can help avoid budget cuts due to delays in ECP processing?

Identifying risk early and ensuring stakeholder awareness is crucial for maintaining project timelines and budget integrity. By recognizing potential issues before they escalate, project teams can proactively address them, which helps to prevent delays that often lead to budget overruns. Stakeholder awareness plays a significant role because it ensures that all parties involved are informed about potential risks and can collaborate on strategies to mitigate them. This collective approach fosters problem-solving and can significantly enhance the efficiency of ECP processing, keeping the project on track both temporally and financially.

The other options, while they may have some merits in specific contexts, do not directly address the critical need for timely communication and risk management to prevent budget cuts due to ECP delays. Implementing new software may improve efficiency but doesn't guarantee early risk identification. Changing the project manager could introduce uncertainty without necessarily speeding up the ECP process. Lastly, limiting communication with contractors could lead to misunderstandings and further delays, ultimately exacerbating the budget issues rather than alleviating them.