WMBA 6882 Week 10 Change Sustainment Plan Example

Keeping Computer-Generated Ordering Alive After the Project Team Disbands: A Sustainment Calendar for Prairie Line From March 2029 to February 2030, Six Old Paths Closed on Named Dates and Two Measures With a Slip Trigger

Student Name

Walden University

WMBA 6882: Initiating and Managing Change

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Keeping Computer-Generated Ordering Alive After the Project Team Disbands: A Sustainment Calendar for Prairie Line From March 2029 to February 2030, Six Old Paths Closed on Named Dates and Two Measures With a Slip Trigger

Handover Date and Owner

The team that ran the ordering project at Prairie Line Farm & Home, this course's composite rural retailer, holds its final steering meeting on February 27, 2029, and disbands the next day. From February 28, the ordering routine belongs to two standing positions: the inventory analytics manager, who owns the system settings and the chain-wide measures, and each store manager, who owns whether department leads review and release orders on time in that store. The director of store operations, who led the project, steps back to a quarterly review.

The project sponsor, the vice president of merchandising, remains in her role but will not attend weekly meetings after February. A review by Buchanan et al. (2005) observed that gains tend to erode once early attention and resources move elsewhere, and that sustaining them depends on many interacting factors rather than any single one. The handover is the moment attention will be withdrawn, so the plan starts there.

Old Paths Still Open, and the Dates They Close

In February 2029, six ways of ordering the old way still exist. Each will be used the first time something goes wrong unless it is closed.

Table 1

Legacy Paths and Their Closing Dates

Prairie Line Farm & Home and its suppliers are composite.

The last row is deliberately not closed. A farm store will always face a customer who needs fifty T-posts tomorrow, and banning the rush form would push that need into one of the closed paths. Instead, the plan watches it: a store whose rush orders rise above eight a month gets a visit from the analyst, because frequent rush orders usually mean the system's minimum quantities are wrong for that store.

Two Measures, One Owner, One Trigger

The plan watches two measures, both reported weekly by the inventory analytics manager to every store manager and quarterly to the director of store operations.

The first measures whether the routine is happening: the share of system orders each store's leads review and release on schedule. It comes from the ordering system's release log. The pilot and both waves ran at 96 to 98 percent in their first full cycles.

The second measures whether the routine is producing anything: the share of the 500 best-selling hardgoods items on the shelf, measured chain-wide and store by store. It comes from the daily on-hand file. The pilot stores rose from 93.1 to 96.4 percent.

The trigger that says the change has slipped is written in advance. If a store releases fewer than 90 percent of orders on schedule for two weeks in a row, or its in-stock rate falls below its pre-conversion level for three weeks, the analyst visits within five working days and the store manager reports what changed. If the chain-wide in-stock rate falls below 95 percent for three weeks, the director of store operations reconvenes a small review group, including two department leads, within two weeks. Bateman (2005), analyzing forty process improvement activities, identified enablers associated with improvements that lasted and stressed that they were things the people running the work area could act on themselves. Giving store managers and the analyst the measures, the trigger and the response puts sustainment in the hands of people who stay after the project team leaves.

The Calendar

Table 2

Sustainment Calendar, March 2029 to February 2030

Months refer to 2029 unless shown otherwise.

Two months carry the most risk. April is the first spring on the new method, when demand for fencing, seed starting and lawn equipment jumps and the system's forecasts will be tested hardest. July is when the written promise not to cut leads' hours because of the change expires. If any store reduces lead hours that month, leads will reasonably conclude the change was about cutting hours all along, and the routine will lose the people it depends on. Repenning and Sterman (2001) described how organizations under pressure cut the time that keeps an improvement working, and then blame the improvement when results fall. The July review is there to catch that before it happens.

What Ends the Plan

The sustainment plan itself ends in February 2030. At that point, the review screen will be part of the lead job description, in-stock rate will have been on the scorecard for more than a year, and every lead hired after the project will have learned only the new method. If the measures have stayed above their triggers for twelve months, the weekly report becomes monthly and the plan is closed.

References

Bateman, N. (2005). Sustainability: The elusive element of process improvement. International Journal of Operations & Production Management, 25(3), 261-276. https://doi.org/10.1108/01443570510581862

Buchanan, D., Fitzgerald, L., Ketley, D., Gollop, R., Jones, J. L., Lamont, S. S., Neath, A., & Whitby, E. (2005). No going back: A review of the literature on sustaining organizational change. International Journal of Management Reviews, 7(3), 189-205. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2370.2005.00111.x

Repenning, N. P., & Sterman, J. D. (2001). Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened: Creating and sustaining process improvement. California Management Review, 43(4), 64-88. https://doi.org/10.2307/41166101