7 Summary

• There are many aspects to the role of a first line manager in change. They include:

  • instigating change;

  • calculating costs;

  • determining feasibility;

  • feeding back information to management;

  • keeping the team informed;

  • working out a strategy for deployment of staff;

  • coping with keeping things running during the change.

• It's important for a first line manager to win the support of their team for a proposed change. This means:

  • selling the idea of change to the team;

  • empowering the team to cope with the change;

  • providing the team with the feeling of ownership of the change.

• A major change can be treated as a project or number of projects.

• The first steps in planning a change project are to establish the scope of the change and its aims and objectives.

• The next steps in project planning are to:

  • establish the approximate timescale and financial constraints within which you are working:

  • establish what staff and other resources you will need or are available to you;

  • identify the main project activities.

• Tools to help you in planning how you are going to achieve a project's aims and objectives are:

  • logic diagrams;

  • critical path diagrams;

  • Gantt charts.

• Constructing a logic diagram will help you to identify the key stages in a project and the order in which they should occur.

• A critical path diagram shows the relationship between different activities, identifying which activities may run in parallel to each other and which must follow on consecutively from each other.

• A Gantt chart is...