PM 360 Week 1 Models for People and Change Example

Cold Rooms and Old Habits: Choosing People and Change Models for a Food Bank's Move to a New Distribution Center

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

PM/360: Models, Methods, and Artifacts

Week 1 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

Valley Harvest Food Bank, its staff, volunteers and project figures are composites written for a model paper.

Valley Harvest Food Bank, a composite nonprofit in Fresno, California, distributes about 38 million pounds of food a year to 210 partner pantries across four counties. Its 1980s warehouse has too little cold storage, so fresh produce from Central Valley growers is often turned away. A $14 million capital campaign has built a 40,000-square-foot distribution center with three cold rooms, a freezer and 12 dock doors, and the food bank is replacing paper pick lists with a warehouse management system and handheld scanners. Thirty-four staff and about 900 volunteers a month will work in the new building. The project manager, Inés Carrillo, has eight weeks to move operations without interrupting deliveries to pantries. This paper applies people-focused models to that move.

Models, Methods and Artifacts

The current standard separates three kinds of tools (Project Management Institute [PMI], 2021). A model is a way of thinking that helps explain a situation, such as a model of how people respond to change. A method is a means of getting a result, such as a scheduling technique. An artifact is a document or deliverable, such as a stakeholder register. This paper deals with models. The standard groups the models most useful to project teams into families, including leadership, communication, motivation, change, complexity, team development and conflict, and stresses that teams should choose the ones that help in their context.

Situational Leadership for Warehouse Leads

Situational leadership models hold that a leader should move between telling and backing people depending on how able and how willing each one is with a particular job. The food bank has four warehouse leads. Two have run the old warehouse for more than ten years: highly skilled at moving food, but new to scanners and nervous about the system. One is a recent hire from a commercial distributor who has used similar systems. One is a former volunteer promoted last year. Carrillo will direct closely with the long-serving leads on scanner use, through hands-on practice sessions and daily check-ins, while consulting them as experts on pick paths and cold-room layout, where their competence is high. She will delegate system configuration questions to the commercial hire and coach the newest lead on both.

Motivation for Volunteers

Volunteers sort, pack and pick, and they come for meaning and company, not pay. Herzberg's two-factor model splits the job into conditions that only cause unhappiness when they are missing and sources of real satisfaction that make people want to return. In the new building, hygiene factors include warm clothing for cold-room shifts, clear parking and check-in and break areas. Motivators include visible results, such as a board showing pounds packed for each county, recognition and the chance to learn the scanners. Carrillo's plan provides insulated jackets in three sizes, a scanner training station for volunteers who want it and a weekly count of meals made possible.

A volunteer who spends a shift in a 34-degree cold room without a jacket will not come back, however inspiring the mission.

Conflict Between Drivers and the Warehouse

The new building assigns dock appointment times to trucks, and the transportation team objects: drivers who arrive early must now wait, while the warehouse wants a steady flow. Thomas (1992) described conflict-handling modes along two dimensions, assertiveness in pursuing one's own concerns and cooperativeness in addressing the other party's, which together yield five styles that run from pushing one's own side hard to giving way entirely, with collaborating and compromising in between. Avoiding would let the problem fester; competing, by imposing appointments, would damage relations with a team the food bank depends on. Carrillo chose collaboration: a joint meeting with the transportation manager and two drivers, a review of arrival data from the old warehouse and agreement on 30-minute windows with two unscheduled doors held open in the morning for early returns.

Change at the Organizational Level

Lewin (1947) pictured a group's habits as held in place by opposing forces; to change them, a leader first loosens the balance, then shifts behavior and finally sets the new pattern so it does not slide back. Unfreezing at Valley Harvest means showing staff why the old way cannot continue: the food bank turned away 1.2 million pounds of produce last year for lack of cold storage. Moving means training, a practice day in the new building with dummy orders and two weeks of running both warehouses in parallel. Refreezing means retiring paper pick lists completely after week 6, updating job descriptions and tracking scanner accuracy.

Change at the Individual Level

Organizational models do not show how each person experiences change. Armenakis and Harris (2002), writing about how leaders should frame change messages, argued that people's readiness depends on beliefs about whether the change is needed, whether this particular fix suits the problem, whether they personally can manage it, whether the people at the top truly back it and what they themselves gain. Carrillo uses these five beliefs as a checklist for each group. Long-serving leads doubt they can do it, so practice sessions come first. Drivers doubt the change benefits them, so the dock agreement addresses their concerns. Volunteers need to know the move is appropriate for the mission, so tours of the cold rooms show where fresh produce will now go.

Limits of the Models

Each model simplifies. Situational leadership assumes leaders can read readiness accurately. The two-factor model was developed with paid employees, not volunteers. Conflict modes describe behavior, not the underlying interests. Lewin's model can imply that change ends, when the food bank will keep adjusting. Readiness beliefs are hard to measure. Carrillo treats each as a prompt for questions, not a formula.

Conclusion

The move to Valley Harvest's new distribution center is as much a people project as a construction and systems project. Choosing models for specific situations, situational leadership for leads, a two-factor view for volunteers, a conflict model for the dock dispute and organizational and individual change models for the move, gives the project manager a structured way to think about each group. Used together and with awareness of their limits, they help keep food moving to pantries while the organization changes how it works.

References

Armenakis, A. A., & Harris, S. G. (2002). Crafting a change message to create transformational readiness. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 15(2), 169-183. https://doi.org/10.1108/09534810210423080

Lewin, K. (1947). Frontiers in group dynamics: Concept, method and reality in social science; social equilibria and social change. Human Relations, 1(1), 5-41. https://doi.org/10.1177/001872674700100103

Project Management Institute. (2021). A guide to the project management body of knowledge (PMBOK guide) (7th ed.). Project Management Institute.

Thomas, K. W. (1992). Conflict and conflict management: Reflections and update. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 13(3), 265-274. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.4030130307