Dell Malaysia Company

The Managing Change / Project Management assignment

Consider a change within your organisation that is happening now, or has happened recently.

1. Taking it as a case study consider how well the change was managed, and compare it with the taught models on how change should ideally be managed. What was good, and what could have been done better?

2. Then analyse the change management in terms of project management and make recommendations as to how its management could be improved using project management techniques. Finally, show how you would have planned the project, using Gantt charts etc, and explain how this would have helped.

Write up the above as a 3000 word report.

Part 1 of the assignment: – Managing Change

Your case study and analysis will need to include three areas

1) Explore the background to change affecting the current situation and the organisation itself. This will be concerned with the issues that have made the organisation consider the need for change. This could be internal – such as a need for restructuring because the present structure does not meet the needs of the market. Or it could be external, to match the needs of a changing business environment that requires greater market flexibility, a move away from a mechanistic approach – we always do it this way – to a more organic approach – what does the market require. This could be driven by changes in demography or economic changes. Strategies may have changed to meet new emergent markets, such as the East European labour market or growth into the BRIC countries. Or it may be that the change occurs because of changes in the product life cycle may mean a need to introduce now areas of growth or other products and services may be in decline.

2) You need to consider systems for understanding and involving others in the process. Some of the following techniques could be used to analyse the people involved:

• Stakeholder analysis

• Cultural Webs

• Different methods of communication

• Management styles like tells/consults, and readiness to listen

• Organisational development models – what structures does it have for developing itself such as the management of ideas.

• Does the organisation have any element of being a learning organisation

• Finally were the staff ‘managed'? Did they have any involvement or ownership of the decision making and implementation? Was there enough consultation and did the organisation use their expert power? In the implementation were the staff sufficiently empowered to deliver the change?

3) Looking at models that are concerned with the implementation of change.

There are various ‘vehicles' that may or may not be relevant in your analysis of change. This section could be speculative – what if they had approached things in a different way, the benefit of hindsight – such as needing a different structure or communication system to make the change work. Some of the models that you might consider would be:

• Are there bottlenecks in the organisation that restrict change – does it need delayering or structural change.

• Consider other forms of organisation such as Matrix models.

• Forcefield analysis, unfreezing/refreezing

• The change curve

• Styles of management appropriate for the change – pull push or

• Better use of empowerment and the talent of staff as a result of the change.

The analysis could reflect on whether there was enough structure to the change and whether they considered any resistance to the change by using Lewin's models. Also did it consider the whether the organisation was suited to supporting the change using the Nadler and Tushman model.

Was there a vision of what the benefits of the change would be? Was there a clear plan - or was progress in the form of unplanned steps and consequences?

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