ORG 5003 Module 5 Diagnosis and Change Plan Example

Restoring Fit After an Acquisition: Diagnosis and a Staged Change Plan for an Underperforming Plant

Student Name

American College of Education

ORG5003 Organizational Dynamics and Change Management

Module 5 Assignment

Instructor Name

September 8, 2025

The Organization and the Evidence

Aldridge Components is a composite manufacturer of precision machined parts for commercial heating and cooling systems, with 620 employees across two plants. No real company, plant, or employee is described here. The Ohio home plant runs 410 employees and the Fairview plant in Tennessee runs 210, acquired 14 months ago to add capacity and a second shipping point. The strategy behind that purchase was one schedule, one lead-time promise, and the ability to quote either plant to the same customer. Fourteen months later, the home plant delivers 96.1% of orders on time and Fairview delivers 82.4%, against a customer requirement of 95%.

Three evidence sources sit behind this diagnosis rather than one. An engagement survey drew 548 responses from 620 employees, an 88% response rate, and the gap between plants concentrates in two items: 41% of Fairview respondents rated decision clarity favorably against 74% at the home plant, and 46% said they get the information they need against 78%. Operating data runs the same direction. Overtime consumed 14.2% of production hours at Fairview against 6.5% in Ohio, 31 corrective actions from the customer quality review remain open, and schedulers logged an average of 11 unplanned schedule changes a day.

The third source is what people said. Twenty-two interviews across four levels and three focus groups with 27 operators produced a consistent account: two planning systems still run side by side, the legacy system at Fairview and the enterprise system in Ohio, and the daily schedule is reconciled by hand. Three of the eight first-line supervisors at Fairview left voluntarily in the 12 months to June 30, 2025, a rate of 37.5% against 9% across the company, and each carried scheduling knowledge that was never written down. Those supervisors covered 184 production employees, a span of 1 to 23, against 1 to 11 in Ohio.

Diagnosis: Where the Fit Breaks

Read through the congruence model, these numbers stop being a list of complaints and become a fit problem. Nadler and Tushman treat performance as the product of fit among the work, the people, the formal organization, and the informal organization, so a diagnosis asks which pair no longer fits rather than which department is failing. The work at Fairview changed on the day of the acquisition, because a shared lead-time promise requires a shared schedule. Nothing else changed with it. The formal organization kept the spans, the decision rights, and the planning system it had carried as a standalone company.

The misfit shows up most sharply between the work and the formal organization. A shift lead at Fairview cannot approve a schedule change of any size, so a routine substitution travels to the plant manager and often to the vice president of operations, which is why 11 changes a day produce delay rather than flexibility. The people component compounds it. Two long-tenured schedulers hold the sequencing knowledge in their heads, and the informal organization has quietly routed every hard question to them for years. That arrangement is the reason the plant still ships at all, which is easy to miss and dangerous to dismantle carelessly.

Stating the root cause in one sentence keeps the plan honest: Fairview is being asked to run new work through an old structure, and an informal network is absorbing the difference until it wears out. The turnover figure is the evidence that it is wearing out. That framing rules some remedies out. More communication would not fix decision rights, and a new planning system installed on top of a span of 1 to 23 would add work to the supervisors who are already the constraint. The sequence in the next section follows from this diagnosis rather than from a standard implementation checklist.

The Change Plan and Its Sequence

Kotter's sequence organizes the plan, and the first steps are done with data rather than speeches. Urgency at Fairview does not need manufacturing, since the customer quality review already carries a 95% delivery requirement and 31 open corrective actions, and those facts go to all eight supervisors and both shifts in the first two sessions. The guiding coalition has nine members, and its composition is the deliberate part. Alongside the plant manager, the vice president of operations, the human resources partner, and the planning system lead, it seats both schedulers and two supervisors chosen by their peers.

Putting the informal power holders inside the coalition rather than around it is the single most important choice in the plan. The vision is written on one page and paired with a decision-rights matrix that says who decides what: a schedule change inside 24 hours is made by the shift lead, a change that moves a customer promise goes to the plant manager, and nothing routine reaches the vice president. Barriers come down before more is asked of anyone. Four supervisor positions are added at Fairview, taking the span from 1 to 23 down to 1 to 15 at roughly $78,000 loaded each, and that happens before standard work is required of the role.

The first win is deliberately small and public. One product family, the 40-series coil housings at 22% of Fairview volume, moves onto the shared schedule on November 3, 2025, with a target of 95% on-time delivery inside 60 days and results posted each Friday in the plant. The remaining families follow in two waves in January and March 2026, and the legacy planning system is retired on March 6, 2026, on a date rather than on an intention. Anchoring runs to May 2026, when the new decision rights enter job descriptions and the plant manager scorecard carries schedule adherence and supervisor retention alongside output.

Resistance and How Success Would Be Judged

Resistance here is specific and can be named group by group. The two schedulers lose an informal authority built over years, because a shared schedule makes their knowledge visible and shareable. The supervisors are being handed huddles and standard work while covering 23 people each, which is exactly how the plant's last improvement effort died. Operators read standard work as a first step toward reducing headcount, and nothing in the last 14 months gives them a reason to read it differently. Naming what each group actually loses is more useful than labeling any of them change resistant.

The responses differ because the losses differ. The schedulers become the formal owners of the scheduling standards and sit in the coalition, which converts an informal power base into a stated role. The supervisors get four added positions before any new expectation lands, since sequencing is the only credible answer to a workload objection. Operators get a plain statement that the shared schedule will not be used to justify layoffs through the first 12 months, and an equally plain statement that no one can promise beyond that, because volume belongs to the customer. A promise that cannot be kept is worse than the fear it was meant to settle.

Objections also carry information, which Ford and colleagues argue is the part most change plans discard. When the schedulers objected that a common lead-time promise ignored a 30-day casting lead time from one supplier, they were right, and the promise was rewritten with a family-level exception before the pilot began. Bridges is useful for the human timing. The ending is the legacy system and the routing habits around it, and the neutral zone is the stretch from November to March when the pilot family runs on the new schedule while everything else runs on the old one. That stretch is staffed and named rather than rushed.

Success is judged on a short set of measures with baselines and dates. On-time delivery at Fairview moves from 82.4% to 95% by June 30, 2026; overtime falls from 14.2% to 8% of production hours; open corrective actions fall from 31 to fewer than 10 by March 31, 2026; supervisor voluntary turnover holds under 12%. Leading indicators are read sooner, including the share of schedule changes decided at shift-lead level, target 80% by February, and the decision clarity item re-run in April 2026 against its 41% baseline. Failure is defined in advance: if the pilot family has not held 95% for four consecutive Fridays by February 2026, the diagnosis is reopened rather than the deadline defended. A plan that cannot say what would falsify it is a schedule, not a change plan.

References

Bridges, W., & Bridges, S. (2017). Managing transitions: Making the most of change (4th ed.). Da Capo Lifelong Books.

Burke, W. W. (2018). Organization change: Theory and practice (5th ed.). SAGE Publications.

Ford, J. D., Ford, L. W., & D'Amelio, A. (2008). Resistance to change: The rest of the story. Academy of Management Review, 33(2), 362-377.

Kotter, J. P. (2012). Leading change. Harvard Business Review Press.

Nadler, D. A., & Tushman, M. L. (1980). A model for diagnosing organizational behavior. Organizational Dynamics, 9(2), 35-51.

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.