Organizational Change Report

Directions

Create a professional business report and presentation to recommend a change to a real business or organization.

Some organizational decisions require a lot of research and consideration. After all, if a company is going to spend time or money on something, the company needs to know that there will be benefits.

For the course project, YOU must research one such decision and recommend whether it should be done or not!

Choose ONE of the following options:

• propose changing a process, policy, or vendor, such as purchasing or leasing new equipment, moving locations, providing a telecommuting option, etc. for a real company or organization of your choosing.
• propose a course, club, or service for uni. 

Imagine you are really going to give this report and presentation to real people to choose whether to act on your recommendation! You must determine who would be responsible for acting on your recommendation and address your report to that audience.

You must address the REAL situation of that audience! For instance, you can’t recommend to a company to offer a telecommuting option if that company already offers a telecommuting option. You can’t recommend a company begin offering dental benefits unless you can show that the company can afford to offer dental benefits.

Research

Because you are proposing a real change for a real company/organization, you will need to research that company/organization. Public institutions (like schools or police departments) as well as publicly-traded companies make public a lot of policies and financial documents, like budgets. If you work(ed) for an organization, you may need to use non-confidential information about the company as part of the report as well.

As you choose your topic, do some preliminary research to make sure you will be able to find professional sources to support your recommendation!

The a Library provides access to many industry journals and publications for managers and leaders who share ideas and outcomes from their experiences in specific industries or management in general. Those publications should be the main sources for your research! 

The goal of research is to find evidence that your proposal has worked at similar companies or under near similar conditions. Find expert opinions or statistics to help demonstrate that your suggestions will actually have the outcomes you propose they will because, based on research, similar outcomes have actually happened or experts believe that such outcomes would happen (even if not directly observed by those experts… yet).

You will probably find that no single source has written about your exact proposal. (This isn’t an academic essay, after all, arguing for or against a political issue, something that many sources have written about!) Instead, you will need to find relevant expert opinions and statistics that relate to specific aspects of your proposal. 

For instance, if you are proposing a flexible scheduling option be adopted by your company, then you would review industry publications specific to your target audience’s industry and/or general managerial or leadership journals (and there are many of those).

Perhaps you want to show the impact of certain types of schedules on injuries, then this source might be helpful: 

Dembe, A. E., et al. “The Impact of Overtime and Long Work Hours on Occupational Injuries and Illnesses: New Evidence from the United States.” Occupational and Environmental Medicine, vol. 62, no. 9, 2005, pp. 588–597., doi:10.1136/oem.2004.016667.

Perhaps you want to show the impact of scheduling on employee morale, then this source might be useful: 

Jang, Soo Jung, et al. “The Interaction Effects of Scheduling Control and Work–Life Balance Programs on Job Satisfaction and Mental Health.” International Journal of Social Welfare, vol. 20, no. 2, 2011, pp. 135–143., doi:10.1111/j.1468-2397.2010.00739.x.

Perhaps you want to discuss strategies for optimal scheduling, then this source might be useful: 

Lesnard, Laurent, and Man Yee Kan. “Investigating Scheduling of Work: a Two-Stage Optimal Matching Analysis of Workdays and Workweeks.” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A (Statistics in Society), vol. 174, no. 2, 2011, pp. 349–368., doi:10.1111/j.1467-985X.2010.00670.x.

Perhaps you want to propose a new process for scheduling a field workforce, then this source might be useful: 

Alsheddy, Abdullah, and Edward P. K. Tsang. “Empowerment Scheduling for a Field Workforce.” Journal of Scheduling, vol. 14, no. 6, 2011, pp. 639–654., doi:10.1007/s10951-011-0232-2.

(Notice too that there exists an entire journal that is dedicated ONLY to scheduling issues! If writing about this topic, you might want to browse that journal’s articles specifically to see what issues concerning scheduling are being addressed and how you might relate some of those issue to your proposal about allowing flexible scheduling as your proposal for your target company.)

Requirements

Your Week 7 business report must include the following:

• A title page
• A cover letter, which should have a summary section to introduce yourself and the purpose of the report, a background section to explain why the reader should be interested in this report, a details section that summarizes the report’s major findings/conclusions, and an action section that invites the reader to do something with the report and/or provides ways to contact you for more discussion of the report or its implementation
• A table of contents
• An executive summary
• 4-7 pages of discussion (introduction, discussion sections, and conclusion/recommendations)
• A works cited (MLA) or references (APA) page with 4-8 sources appropriate for a professional audience (Be sure to use these sources and provide appropriate MLA or APA in-text citations for these sources in the discussion section too!)
• At least 1 appendix
• At least 1 technical illustration, such as a chart, graph, or image, that you created (i.e., not an image copy/pasted from another source)***

***The technical illustration should be in the body of the report and not in the appendix. Both the technical illustration and the appendix must have textual references included, such as “Appendix A shows…” or “Figure 1 demonstrates…”

The Week 7 business report should be 4-7 pages (from the first page of the introduction to the last page of the conclusion/recommendations sections, so this page count does not include the cover letter, table of contents, appendix, etc.).

Use SINGLE spacing for all business writing, including this report!

The Week 7 business report must be professionally formatted as demonstrated in this Pearson Business Report Sample (the sample report begins on page 208).

Purpose and Audience: The purpose of this report is to make a practical and realistic proposal to an audience about a change or proposed idea that the audience could actually act upon. The audience is whomever would really be responsible for acting upon your report’s recommendation.