MBA 687 Module 5 Milestone Two Change Management Plan example

Milestone Two: Change Management Plan for the Veritane US One Platform Program

[Student Name]

Southern New Hampshire University

MBA 687: Leading Organizational Change

Module Five Milestone Two

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The organization, setting and figures below are a composite written as a model document. No real employer, client, colleague or patient is described.

Milestone Two: Change Management Plan for the Veritane US One Platform Program

Introduction

Milestone One found that Veritane US employees accept that the branch must change how it builds and supports software, but doubt that the global platform is the right answer and doubt that leaders will follow through. The Burke-Litwin diagnosis showed that the One Platform program touches the branch's mission, leadership and culture as well as its structure and systems. This plan responds to both findings. It uses the steps described by Kotter (1995) as the program's structure and ADKAR stages as a coaching tool for managers, and it covers stakeholders, strategic goals, organizational systems, team collaboration and resistance.

Key Stakeholders and Their Significance

Applying the salience model of Mitchell et al. (1997), four groups hold power, legitimacy and urgency at once. The 38 enterprise clients decide whether the program protects or loses revenue; several hold contract terms guaranteeing custom features. The 11 senior engineers responsible for the custom code base hold the knowledge the migration depends on and the client relationships that make their departure costly. The 30 implementation and support staff lose the build work most of them value and will carry the change into every client conversation. The 34 sales and account managers control the client relationships and fear competitors will use migration as an opening. The general manager and Singapore platform leadership complete the guiding coalition's core.

Each group has a named role in the plan. Senior engineers form the migration design group. Two implementation leads and two account managers join the guiding coalition. Clients are sequenced by complexity, with account managers deciding the order within each wave.

Strategic Goals

Table 1 sets four goals with measures and target dates.

Table 1

Strategic Goals for the One Platform Program

Note. Composite targets. Baselines from the Milestone One survey and last year's HR data.

Improving Organizational Systems

The Burke-Litwin diagnosis showed that systems, structure and management practices will all shift, and if they are left untouched they will pull people back to custom work. Four changes are planned.

Performance measures will change first. Engineers are currently evaluated on client-specific feature delivery; from the first quarter they will be evaluated on contributions to shared platform releases and on migration milestones. Implementation staff will be measured on client adoption of configured features rather than hours billed to custom builds.

Incentives will follow. Sales commissions currently reward custom feature deals, which would keep generating new custom code during the migration. The commission plan will be revised so that renewals of migrated clients earn at least as much as renewals of custom ones, and new custom commitments will require the general manager's approval.

The release process will move to the global pipeline in stages, with a U.S. release manager in each squad so that branch engineers see their work in global releases from the start.

Finally, a request intake process will route client feature requests to the platform product council, where U.S. representatives hold two of seven seats. This turns the old habit of building whatever a client asks into a channel that can make popular requests available to every client.

Enhancing Team Collaboration

The new structure places branch engineers in six product squads shared with Singapore, across a time difference of 12 or 13 hours, depending on daylight saving time. Hinds and Mortensen (2005) found that conflict in geographically distributed teams was lower when members held a shared identity and shared context, and that spontaneous, informal communication helped keep conflict from escalating. The plan builds all three.

Each squad will have a two-week working visit in its first quarter, alternating between Delaware and Singapore, to build personal relationships. Squads will share one backlog, one chat channel and one set of working agreements, replacing the separate U.S. and Singapore channels. A daily overlap hour, early morning in Delaware and evening in Singapore, will rotate so that neither side always carries the inconvenient hour. Working agreements will make decision rules explicit: who decides, how dissent is raised and how decisions are communicated, which addresses the misreadings of communication style identified in Milestone One.

Anticipated Resistance and Responses

Ford et al. (2008) argued that resistance often reflects how change agents behave, broken agreements and poor communication among them, and that objections can strengthen a change if taken seriously. Oreg (2003) also showed that individuals differ in their disposition to resist change, so some employees will need more support regardless of the plan's quality. Table 2 lists the five objections heard most often in interviews.

Table 2

Anticipated Objections, Responses and Owners

Note. Composite objections paraphrased from interviews.

Choosing Engagement Over Pressure

Kotter and Schlesinger (1979) described a range of responses to resistance, from education and participation through negotiation to coercion, and advised matching the response to the cause and to the resisters' power. Most objections here arise from real losses and low trust, and the groups raising them hold significant power, which points toward participation, support and, for sales, negotiation of the commission plan. Pressure would be fastest for a few weeks and costly for years in a branch where a fifth of staff already leave annually. The plan reserves directive action for one issue only: new custom code commitments will stop after month three, because allowing them to continue would make the migration impossible.

Next Steps

The final plan will add the communication sequence for each stakeholder group, the phased rollout calendar with named owners, the leadership behaviors expected of the coalition and the measures that will show whether the change is holding after each migration wave.

References

Ford, J. D., Ford, L. W., & D'Amelio, A. (2008). Resistance to change: The rest of the story. Academy of Management Review, 33(2), 362-377. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2008.31193235

Hinds, P. J., & Mortensen, M. (2005). Understanding conflict in geographically distributed teams: The moderating effects of shared identity, shared context, and spontaneous communication. Organization Science, 16(3), 290-307. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1050.0122

Kotter, J. P. (1995). Leading change: Why transformation efforts fail. Harvard Business Review, 73(2), 59-67.

Kotter, J. P., & Schlesinger, L. A. (1979). Choosing strategies for change. Harvard Business Review, 57(2), 106-114.

Mitchell, R. K., Agle, B. R., & Wood, D. J. (1997). Toward a theory of stakeholder identification and salience: Defining the principle of who and what really counts. Academy of Management Review, 22(4), 853-886. https://doi.org/10.2307/259247

Oreg, S. (2003). Resistance to change: Developing an individual differences measure. Journal of Applied Psychology, 88(4), 680-693. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.88.4.680