Long wait times of the emergency room

The purpose of this organizational change project is to stimulate experiential learning and develop skills useful for leading change initiatives that involve a team, unit, or entire organization. You will identify an organizational problem or opportunity for improvement in an organization to which you have access and develop a plan for change. Ideally, this will be a health care organization, but any organizational setting, including a volunteer one, will suffice. You will synthesize your learnings in the form of a final plan that diagnoses an organizational problem, assesses readiness to change, lays out a systematic plan, and presents the rationale for the change.

You must apply course content to your project, gathering and beginning to analyze material for your plan as you go.
To gather data, use multiple approaches, including interviewing others in the organization or with knowledge of the problem, collecting organizational materials relevant to the problem, and conducting research to see how other organizations have tackled similar situations.

Suggested week-by-week content are as follows. These activities are designed to allow you to apply that week’s lecture and reading materials to your projects.

•Week 4- Define the problem situation that needs to be changed. Or, if you choose to take a positive change approach, define the opportunity to be pursued. You should gather as much information as you can about the current situation and attempt to understand why it is occurring.

•Week 5- Assess readiness for change in the organization and identify what managerial actions might be needed to prepare staff members to change effectively. You may not be able to formally assess readiness, but you should develop a plan for how you would go about assessing it and do all you can to
develop a sense of how ready people are for change.

•Week 6- Develop a change process, drawing on the steps in John Kotter’s or a similarly detailed step-by-step change management process model. Gather data that will help you develop a timeline and lay out the order and details of key activities in your plan.

•Week 7- Develop a persuasive rationale for the change and a plan for communicating it. You should also anticipate reactions to change and develop strategies for managing these reactions.

Minimum Contents:

At a minimum, you should do the following in your final plan.

• Describe your Organizational Change Project. Explain what you intend to change and why; how and when you propose to go about it; how you would ensure staff and other stakeholders are ready for the proposed change; and what results you anticipate. Provide sufficient information about the context and problem so the reader can adequately understand your approach.
Be detailed and specific, backing up your statements with concrete examples and data from your weekly research.

• Fully cite any published work you reference, using a consistent citation format of your choosing.

•Throughout your final plan, draw on concepts and theories from the course to explain both your approach to change and the expected results of your plan. These should go beyond the obvious, demonstrating depth of reflection and learning. There is no prescribed format; however, please organize and label sections of your plan in ways that clearly address the core concerns covered in this course: the what, when, how, and why of your change initiative. Aim for 5 single-spaced pages for the main body of the plan, placing additional material in appendices as needed. Please ensure that the plan is well organized, professional in tone, proofread, and clearly written