The question

Organisational change is an integral part of the world of work, and must be managed effectively to facilitate the optimisation of your professional development.

a. Write an essay which chronicles a critical incident of significant organisational change which affected you directly in terms of your central involvement in that change. Your essay should briefly outline the change in question, and then evaluate how the change was managed by applying established change management theories, tools and techniques to the incident. Make recommendations as to how such a change could be managed better, should further similar organisational change be required in the future (80).

b. Reflect briefly on how this incident of change affected you in terms of your feelings, learnings and the conclusions you drew from the change experience; commenting on how your approach to change has been influenced by the experience (20).

Guidance notes for summative 2

In your answer to part a, structure is important to get right otherwise you risk tying yourself in knots! To answer part a. well you must spend significant time planning the answer before you write.
The change incident could be anything from full organisational restructure to smaller departmental changes. The important thing is that you must be significantly affected by it. This could mean you had responsibilities for carrying out all or part of the change, or you could have been significantly affected by it either in job role, or in how you perform your current role.
Outline the change in sufficient detail for you to be able to evaluate the key elements of the change – but do not spend vast word counts getting into superfluous detail.
Then you need to look at the available change management tools that you can use to evaluate what happened – there are many of these, so you need to choose those that are appropriate to what you wish to argue. Always remember there is no one right answer – you must build a well evidenced case for your assertions. When using theories, explain it very briefly, then demonstrate you understand it by using it to evaluate the appropriate aspects of the change you intend it to inform.
Then, when your arguments are complete, make logical recommendations based on your assertion as to how your critical change incident could be managed better should a similar change be required again in the future.
Write a brief conclusion to part a.
Spend 80% of the word count on part a.

When answering part b. remember that, as a reflective piece, the focus is on you personally rather than your organisation. Therefore, your answer needs to be on a more personal level. As in summative 1, you should explore your feelings, and structure your answer with the help of a recognised reflective model.
Part b. only requires 20% of the word count, so you must demonstrate good economy of language to be as informative, yet as succinct as possible.

House Keeping Information
• You should answer both parts a. and b. of each summative
• The word count for each summative (parts a. and b. combined) is 2000 +/- 10%