Description

Discuss the challenges of change and uncertainty

Discuss the following questions with your peers in the class-wide forum: 

• What issues have you encountered dealing with uncertainty or change in strategic projects?
• What were the causes of these complexities and what responses have you observed that work, or don’t work?
• How did these issues impact on the project’s performance, outputs, outcomes, or legacy?

Please write the discussion post like, it is your own experience. Does not need reference or something else. Here is the other example from other student. 

And please give me also two response post for example 1 and 2 below. 

Example 1 

Instability of the our 'supply chain being in place' for us to transfer our design risk to them, became an emergent complexity.  The issue was the behaviour and response differences when working with our large most design capable 'Full-Service Suppliers' (FSS) versus our less capable 'Build to Print Suppliers' (BPS).  We thought and expected that our FSS would buy-in to our win-win partnership taking full ownership, management and delivery of our main system designs.  We saw the BPS's being limited in design capability and thus not taking the ownership due to their lower capability.  Thus, we had a clear vision of our top 10 System FSS understanding and supporting our strategy and project. 

Our largest FSS (duopoly) was slow, stalling maybe, delaying their understanding.  We responded with detailed 'boundary objects', manuals, to bridge the ownership of the requirements to risk to validation.  It didn't work.  These manuals were already massive and became even larger from the FSS.  Why?  The FSS didn't want to take extra risk for the same price.  They were too comfortable in their current customer v supply model.  Thus, the performance of pace slowed; the output became too massive; the outcome was to continue as before, the legacy was not producing innovation to differentiate from the competition.   Success, with expected FSS, failed.  On the other hand, our BPS's saw great opportunity and input energy to grow their capability.  This surprised us.  But it would require much more scale, pace, resource, change, funding.  

So, the performance improvement to introduced supplier innovation was multiplied, the outputs more capable, the outcome saw reduced design risk accelerated into production.  Perception was not of much measured successes (because we didn't know how to measure that).  But it did create other emergent complexities both negative and positive, in the loss of ownership of Intellectual Property Rights, how to verify and validate work in India and China, yet a remote working instead of local integration and a potential to transfer the company engineers into the supply base.

Happy for your expert views around this, to help manage the complexities and gain more success.  Thank you. 

Example 2 

My project is commencing in June. This was the result of an election pledge by ruling Liberal party Federally and Labours party in our state. Some of the structures may be affected if another party comes to power. Though we have $100M allocated, not sure what would happen after COVID related spending. This project involves transformation of clinical trials Governance processes. If ether are changes internationally due to COVID lessons, then we will have to quickly modify our planned processes. Then Internal changes will be related to changes in team members, attitude, commitment and mindset of stakeholders and technology platforms since it is a 5 year project.

Though we can't change the external political changes, we may have to find mechanisms to embed this into operational plan and keep consumer and clinical peak bodies and media as "influencers" since this is about decreasing disparity in access to rural people. We also have to keep the National party in the loop since they hold most safe seats in rural sector. If funds are reduced post COVID, we'll have to adjust the scope and pick the most important objectives. For internal changes, keeping accurate records of meetings and plans are important for hand-over and continuity purposes so that new people can pick it up quickly. An effective orientation package can also be useful to train new people quickly. We have to explore mechanisms to keep stakeholders engaged and excited over 5 years- examples---getting team members to present at conferences, seminars and hospital grand rounds, holding an annual or 6 monthly "project conference" or similar forum, awarding of prizes and more. 

However, if the tele trial model of care is adopted and rural patients can access clinical trials closer to home consistently across Australia, that would be a great outcome regardless of process reforms.