MGMT 690 Week 1 DB Forum 1 Thread Example

Discussion Board Forum 1: Thread

MGMT 690 Capstone, Project Management, Discussion Board Forum 1: Thread

Thread by [Student Name]

The prompt and the grocery chain's rollout are composites standing in for the course's own forum; Jarocki's book, the peer-reviewed studies, Kotter's article and Scripture are real; the requirements follow Liberty's public course guide for MGMT 690.

Last year the regional grocery chain where I manage store operations projects installed self-checkout lanes in 38 stores. The project team delivered 152 lanes in nine weeks, $210,000 under budget, with software tested and every store's staff trained on the machines. By the project's measures it succeeded. Three months after launch, fewer than one transaction in five used the new lanes, against a target of 40 percent. Cashiers were steering customers to staffed lanes, shift managers kept the self-checkout area half closed on busy evenings, and many older customers told us they did not want to use them.

The project plan had covered hardware, software, training on how the machines worked and a launch schedule. It had not covered the people whose work and habits had to change. Hornstein (2015) contends that projects which alter how people work now fail unless the human change is managed alongside the technical delivery, so the two disciplines must be practiced as one. Our team had no change management activities in its schedule and no one responsible for them. Looking back at the charter, the word cashier did not appear once, even though cashiers were the people whose daily work the project changed most.

Research on reactions to change explains what we saw. Oreg et al. (2011), reviewing 79 quantitative studies of change recipients' reactions published over six decades, found that reactions depend on recipients' characteristics and context, on how the change process is handled and on whether they perceive the change as beneficial or harmful to themselves. Our cashiers believed, not unreasonably, that self-checkout would cut their hours, and no one had told them otherwise; the company actually planned to move them to online order picking. Shift managers had not been asked how to staff the area, so they protected the lanes they understood. Parker et al. (2013) argue that change initiatives can be managed with the same project-based processes used for other projects, which suggests that our project should have carried change deliverables, such as a communication plan for cashiers and a staffing guide for managers, alongside its hardware deliverables. Jarocki (2011) makes a similar argument in proposing a single method that unifies project and change management.

In the fall we relaunched the lanes as a change effort rather than an installation. Store directors met with cashiers to explain the move to online order picking and to guarantee hours for those who wanted them. Shift managers helped write a staffing guide for the self-checkout area, and a few cashiers became lane hosts who helped hesitant customers through their first transactions. Within six weeks, usage had risen to 34 percent, and complaints from older customers fell as hosts walked them through the machines.

When Rehoboam became king, he rejected the counsel of the elders to serve the people and speak kindly to them, and instead announced that he would make their burden heavier; the northern tribes rejected him (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, 1 Kings 12:6-16). Rehoboam's project was the kingdom's continuation, and he lost it by ignoring the people who had to live with his decision. We have since added a change workstream to our project template, beginning with conversations with the people whose work will change.

Group: on your projects, who owned the people side of the change, and was it in the schedule?

References

English Standard Version Bible. (2016). Crossway. (Original work published 2001)

Hornstein, H. A. (2015). The integration of project management and organizational change management is now a necessity. International Journal of Project Management, 33(2), 291-298. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijproman.2014.08.005

Jarocki, T. L. (2011). The next evolution: Enhancing and unifying project and change management. Brown & Williams Publishing.

Oreg, S., Vakola, M., & Armenakis, A. (2011). Change recipients' reactions to organizational change: A 60-year review of quantitative studies. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 47(4), 461-524. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021886310396550

Parker, D., Charlton, J., Ribeiro, A., & Pathak, R. D. (2013). Integration of project-based management and change management: Intervention methodology. International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, 62(5), 534-544. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJPPM-10-2012-0108