MLDR 6905 Week 1 Capstone Topic Proposal Example

One Contested Change, Named Plainly: A Capstone Topic Proposal to Consolidate Continuing Education Registration, Scheduling and Billing Across a Community College's Four Campuses

Student Name

Walden University

MLDR 6905: Capstone: A Case for Leaders as Change Agents

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

One Contested Change, Named Plainly: A Capstone Topic Proposal to Consolidate Continuing Education Registration, Scheduling and Billing Across a Community College's Four Campuses

The College

Cedar Hollow Community College is a composite public college with four campuses in southwest Missouri: the Main campus, two suburban campuses and the Linden campus, which serves a rural county about forty miles from the others. Its continuing education division offers noncredit courses, professional certificates and customized training for local employers. The division pays for itself. Course fees and employer training contracts brought in about $6.2 million last year from roughly 11,400 registrations and 140 employer contracts. Each campus runs its own continuing education office with its own registration desk, its own printed and online catalog and its own way of invoicing employers. Nine clerks across the four offices do this work.

The Change

I propose to argue that the four campus offices should hand registration, timetabling and invoicing for noncredit courses to one shared-services team serving the whole college, while each campus keeps responsibility for program design and for its relationships with local employers.

Why the Change Is Contested

This change is not obvious, and people at the college disagree about it for reasons that deserve a hearing. The dean of workforce and continuing education supports it, citing duplicated work and inconsistent billing. Two of the four campus directors oppose it. The Linden director argues that rural learners, many of them older adults and shift workers, rely on walk-in help at a desk they know, and that a central unit would treat her campus as an afterthought. The director of one suburban campus argues that his office's employer clients value a single contact who handles both their training plan and their invoice. A third director is undecided.

There is also a history. Six years ago, the college tried to centralize noncredit registration on the Main campus. After one term of registration errors, including learners enrolled in the wrong sections and employer cohorts split across invoices, the attempt was abandoned. Staff still mention it. Weick (1984) made the case for cutting a large problem into small, finished wins, and the earlier attempt, which moved everything at once, is part of why this proposal matters: a second failure would make the change impossible for years.

My Standing and My Bias

I am a program manager in continuing education at the Main campus, responsible for twelve certificate programs and for scheduling across them. I have no authority over the other campuses. That matters, because the capstone asks how leaders can act as change agents, and I would be one without formal power. Battilana and Casciaro (2012) traced how far a change agent could carry a break with routine to where she stood among colleagues' informal ties, which makes my position worth examining rather than assuming.

I also have an obvious bias. The Main campus would gain most from consolidation, since the shared-services unit would likely sit there and its staff would grow. I will state that bias in every section where it could shape my judgment, and the stakeholder case will be addressed to the director who would lose most.

What the Case Will Draw On

The capstone will draw on earlier courses in the program, identified here by subject: organizational change, for the network lens and the history of failed change; finance, for the cost of registration processing; ethics, for questions of fairness to rural learners; communication, for how the case is argued to people who oppose it; and team leadership, for how a working group might build the first small wins. Week 9 will test which of these the case actually needs. A capstone that leans on every course equally usually leans on none of them hard enough, so the removal test is built in now.

Scope

The capstone will argue for the change, describe the college's context, address the stakeholder who loses most, plan the first ninety days and set out how the change would be measured. It will not cover credit registration, which is handled by a different office, or the college's choice of registration software, which is already shared. Meyerson and Scully (1995) describe people who are committed to their organization while working to change it from within; the capstone will treat that tension as part of the case rather than ignore it. The question it must finally answer is not whether consolidation is a good idea in general, but whether this college, with its history and its budget, should do it now, and on what terms a program manager could responsibly push for it. If the evidence gathered over the term points the other way, the capstone will say so.

References

Battilana, J., & Casciaro, T. (2012). Change agents, networks, and institutions: A contingency theory of organizational change. Academy of Management Journal, 55(2), 381-398. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2009.0891

Meyerson, D. E., & Scully, M. A. (1995). Tempered radicalism and the politics of ambivalence and change. Organization Science, 6(5), 585-600. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.6.5.585

Weick, K. E. (1984). Small wins: Redefining the scale of social problems. American Psychologist, 39(1), 40-49. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.39.1.40