Problem Solving in Organizations A Methodological Handbook for Business and Management Students

The Timing of Change Plan Design

Usually a student field problem-solving (FPS) assignment is terminated by formal go/no-go decision-making by the principal of the project on the proposed solution for the agreed problem and on the associated change plan. Typically this is done in a management meeting of the organization or department concerned. Sometimes this will be done in an ordinary management meeting, sometimes in an extraordinary management meeting, for which also stakeholders from outside the management team are invited. This decision-making may involve some amendments in the proposed solution and change plan.

Your assignment termination is not the termination of the improvement project for which you have played such a key role. After the decision is made on your solution and change plan, the intervention step of the problem-solving cycle is taken – that is, the actual change process is executed. Your objective was not to make a sophisticated solution design, but to create, through your (sophisticated) solution design, your change plan and the created organizational support for both, the best possible conditions for a successful intervention, resulting in the desired performance improvement. Your designs are not ends, but means to create performance improvement.

The change plan, proposed by you, specifies the various actions to be taken after a go-decision to make the solution ‘work’, the people that are to execute these actions, and the people that should get involved in the change process. Decision-making on this organizational change involves the authorization of the change plan (after possible amendments) and the formal assignment of people to the planned actions by the managers responsible (normally according to the proposals in the change plan).

The above implies that you have to make a change plan before the formal go/ no-go decision-making and not after this decision-making as a kind of optional extra. The change plan provides essential information to the decision-makers to make a go/no-go decision as it makes clear what a go-decision will involve in terms of time and staffing, and possibly money.

In fact, change planning should start right at the beginning of the project. Every business problem is embedded in a political-cultural environment, of which the student consultant forms a part. The mere fact that you have entered the organization in order to work on a certain problem has an impact straight away, among other things because it increases the awareness and perceived importance of the problem in question.