ORG5003 Module 6 change implementation plan example

Nine Months to One Production Center and Eighteen to Make It Stick: The Implementation Plan for a Title Firm's Change, With Owners, Sequence and a Sustainment Step

Student Name

American College of Education

ORG5003: Organizational Dynamics & Change Management

Module 6 Assignment

Instructor Name

September 21, 2025

Readiness

Armenakis and Harris (2009), summarizing three decades of their work, named five beliefs that the people living through a change need before they will commit to it, which they labeled discrepancy, appropriateness, efficacy, principal support and valence: roughly, why change at all, why this change, can we do it, do our leaders mean it and what is in it for us. At Harborline Title and Escrow, the composite firm in this course, the evidence gathered in earlier modules shows where each belief stands. The need is accepted at headquarters and in slow branches but not yet in the three busiest ones. The appropriateness of the design has improved since the branch managers' objections reshaped it. Efficacy is weakest among examiners at the shore offices, who have never used the firm's main production system. Principal support is doubted because of the dropped 2019 checklist. And the personal benefit is unclear to examiners who fear for their jobs.

Each gap is assigned an action in the plan below: the pilot results for need, the redesigned service guarantee for appropriateness, training and paired examiners for efficacy, the chief executive's visible presence at each branch conversion for principal support and the no-layoff commitment for benefit. Readiness is not a mood to be hoped for; it is a list of beliefs, each with an action attached.

Four Phases

Phase one, months one and two, builds the coalition and the design. The steering group, the chief operating officer, the senior examiner, two of the three high-volume branch managers and a shore office examiner, meets weekly. The senior examiner leads design workshops with examiners and processors from every branch, as Module 3 set out, and the group signs off the service guarantee. Exit criterion: a written production process and guarantee approved by every member of the steering group.

Phase two, months three and four, converts the four shore offices to the single production system and stands up the production center with the four pilot examiners plus the shore offices' examiners. Starting with the shore offices is deliberate, since their error rate improved most in the eight-week trial, and that improvement gives the whole firm its first visible win. Exit criterion: shore office commitments meeting the guarantee for four consecutive weeks.

Phase three, months five to seven, converts the remaining seven branches in two waves, the slower branches first and the three high-volume branches last, each keeping one on-site examiner. Phase four, months eight and nine, retires the legacy system, completes redeployment of examiners who choose settlement roles and hands daily management of the center to its operations lead.

Owners

Each part of the plan has one owner. The chief operating officer sponsors the change and chairs the steering group. The senior examiner owns the production process and the service guarantee's standards. A production center operations lead, hired in phase one, owns daily throughput, staffing and weekly guarantee reports. The information technology manager owns the system conversion and the retirement of the legacy system. The HR manager owns the no-layoff commitment, redeployment and training records. Each branch manager owns their branch's conversion date, the introduction of the named examiner pair to key referral partners and the monthly review of those partners' orders.

Messages by Audience

The same change means different things to different groups, so each hears a message built around its own concern. Examiners hear that there will be no layoffs, that work will be shared fairly and that the senior examiner designed the process. Processors hear what changes in how files reach them and who to call. Closers hear that nothing changes at the closing table and that commitments should arrive sooner. Branch managers hear the service guarantee and the escalation route. And referral partners, realtors and lenders, hear from their own branch manager, in person, that they will deal with the same people and should expect faster commitments. Kotter (1995) found that transformation efforts often fail from undercommunicating the vision by a factor of ten; here, each branch conversion is preceded by a visit from the chief executive and the senior examiner.

Costs and Savings

One-time costs total about $260,000: about $140,000 to migrate the four shore offices' records and configure the single system, about $55,000 for training time, about $40,000 to fit out the production center space and about $25,000 for the operations lead's recruitment. Annual savings, once conversion is complete, come from three sources. Examiner capacity falls by about five and a half positions through attrition, less the three on-site examiners kept by the concession in Module 4, a net saving of about $154,000. Halving post-closing corrections saves about $74,000. And retiring the legacy system's licenses and support saves about $48,000. The total, about $276,000 a year, repays the one-time costs within the first full year after conversion, before counting any gain in orders from faster service.

Risks and the Triggers That Answer Them

Three risks could derail the plan, and each has a trigger set in advance so that the steering group responds to evidence rather than to complaints. The first is the spring rush. The pilot ran in a slow season, so if the production center misses the three-day guarantee for more than two consecutive weeks during the busy months, the operations lead may borrow examiners back from the on-site roles and approve paid overtime without waiting for the steering group. The second is the loss of referral partners. If orders from any high-volume branch's top 20 partners fall by more than 10 percent over a quarter, the branch manager and the senior examiner meet those partners in person within a month. The third is the loss of the senior examiner, on whom much of the design rests. Two examiners from other branches will work alongside the senior examiner throughout phases one to three, so that the knowledge behind the new process is held by more than one person before the project team steps back.

Sustainment

In their review of how organizations keep changes in place, Buchanan et al. (2005) reported that gains frequently decay once attention moves elsewhere, and that sustainability depends on many interacting factors, from the substance of the change and the people involved to the organization's culture and politics. Harborline's plan includes four sustainment steps. First, the legacy system is retired, not merely unused, so there is no easy way back. Second, the service guarantee and correction rate become part of every branch manager's annual goals and of the production center lead's, so both sides are measured on the shared result. Third, the steering group continues monthly for 12 months after conversion and quarterly after that, reviewing time to commitment, guarantee adherence, corrections, referral partners' order volume and examiner turnover. Fourth, the lobby plaque is awarded on client service scores as well as orders, a small artifact that tells every branch what the firm now values.

References

Armenakis, A. A., & Harris, S. G. (2009). Reflections: Our journey in organizational change research and practice. Journal of Change Management, 9(2), 127-142. https://doi.org/10.1080/14697010902879079

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

Kotter, J. P. (1995). Leading change: Why transformation efforts fail. Harvard Business Review, 73(2), 59-67.