Case Change Exercise
Build a Case for Change using the Scenario below.
A case for change is a compelling business case for change that communicates the organizational and personal motivations for change and the urgency for change.
• What are we changing and what is not changing?
• Why are we changing it?
• What’s in it for me?
• What are the consequences of not changing?
Submission should be 1 page long.
Scenario:
Change in an IT Project Scenario
You are a manager in the IT department and the CIO has assigned you to manage the transition to change out IT infrastructure and software. The organization is currently ¬using MS Office, now moving everything to Google Suite. The organization hasn’t practiced good application portfolio management so there are multiple versions of MS Office being used and some of the departments have bought their own MS enterprise licenses. When Windows 7 was sunsetted a few years ago, the changes were not communicated well, and several departments lost key documents. There is no central repository for information, many documents are not backed up and some are on personal PC.
Current State
The operating system we have now is no longer supported. Licenses for software will no longer support, no upgrades, no tech support, have to invest in a new system. This will mean a major change in infrastructure and support for Office products.
The risk
The move to Google Suite has not been well researched, the CIO went to a conference and talked to other CIO’s who made the change to Google. There are a lot of unknowns, including feasibility, security, conversion, and not much IT governance.
The IT Organization Challenge
• This is a company that is based in Bellevue that started 5 years ago, created by 4 people doing similar work for a larger organization. They had a small office for a couple of years, then expanded and opened an office in Fremont last year. There are three people who moved to Portland and are trying to open an office there.
• When the company expanded, they didn’t add any layers of management, so team leaders are supervising a team of 30 people or more. The workspaces are open workspaces and the company uses the term “adaptative leadership” but this means that people must work things out for themselves. Some haven’t seen their supervisor in months.
• The CIO wanted to make sure this had enough time, so she chose October as the cutover month. There hasn’t been any project management planning to see how long this would actually take to implement.
• Most of the company uses Microsoft products. They use Outlook for email, SharePoint for document storage, and Skype for instant messaging and video meetings. Some workgroups have figured out how to use Microsoft Teams and have installed their own version using personal email accounts to set it up. There have been numerous complaints about SharePoint because each site looks different and there is no consistency from site to site.
• When the CIO brought you the idea, she said she wanted to try out a pilot this time. This was always brought up, but there was either no time or it got started but not finished.
