Weeks 13-15 Assignment: Consulting Project (Project 2)

In this final project you will act as consultants to an organization. Here you get to actually put all of your knowledge to work!

---

The Plan

Your primary concern is to generate a plan for the org on how it can improve communication with the use of blogs and aggregators, wikis, and mobile technologies. You can choose to emphasize whichever technologies you feel are most appropriate for the org.

Here are some things I want to see:

• Refer to Chs. 12 & 13 in your textbook on "Organizational Change." Show how your plan takes into account the organization's "informal networks" (Ch. 12). Also, show how your plan takes into account at least three of the "six conditions necessary for successful change" (Ch. 13).
• Refer to Weick's Organizational Information Theory. In your recommendations, suggest strategies that involve at least one of the following (Weick's concepts): "requisite variety," "stamping out utility," and / or "galumphing."
• Deal with "information," "redundancy," "noise," "channels" (or "lines"), and "nodes" (or "sender/receivers").
• Link to sites that explain the organizational benefits of blogs, aggregators, wikis, and mobile technologies.

[I recommend that you start researching for this project immediately. Since it draws on most everything we've been doing in this course and will be doing for the next several weeks, the study guide assignments that you have done and the ones you will do can all be considered preparation and research for this project. If you get a jump on this project over Thanksgiving Break, then you'll have three full weeks to work on it without any other major assignments due in my course.]

---

The Teams

I would prefer that you work in teams of 2 or 3 (but no larger). If you want to work solo I won't prohibit it, but I don't recommend it as this final assignment entails a good bit of work.

Each team member should elect a leader. Each team member will post only to the team leader's project blog. There is a reason for this. As one team begins to link to another teams' project, I want to make sure that those links all go to the same blog. Each project should have one blog "home."

Team Leaders, to allow team members to post to your blog:

1. Go to your Blogger dashboard.
2. Choose your project blog.
3. Choose the "Settings" tab.
4. Choose the "Members" tab.
5. Click on "Add Team Member(s)"
6. Put in the email addresses of your team members.
7. After you receive confirmation (through email) that they have accepted your invitation to edit your project blog, go back into the "Members" section of your project blog and check the box under "Admin" in the row beside each of their names. This will allow them full control over posting and editing functions.

---

The Organization

Pick a real organization, whether it's a business organization or some sort of not-for-profit or non-profit org (e.g. somewhere you've actually worked, some org that interests you, some org you'd like to be part of, some org that you think needs help, or some org that one of your team members is excited about). It can't be "me and my four friends from high school"—but I'll allow most everything else.

You do not have to actually approach the org with your idea, but I will give you extra credit if you do. It might be helpful, if the org is local and accessible, to interview someone from the org or observe how the org is structured (the org chart, a few things about the network, about the org culture, about the tech they use [do they rely heavily on email for example?]). At the end of the semester, you could even offer your plan to them by sending them a permalink to the relevant post in your project blog. Again, this is not a requirement, but it would be very cool to do and I'll reward it handsomely (with extra credit and praise).

---

Due Dates:

1. First Installment: Wednesday, Dec. 1, 11:59 PM.
2. Second Installment: Wednesday, Dec. 8, 11:59 PM.
3. Final Installment: Sunday, Dec. 12, 11:59 PM.

More about the installments:

• The first two installments don't have a specific length or number of links. But I want them to be substantial enough to ensure that teams can begin to link to each others' projects before Dec. 12.
• Each team member should post the same final project to his or her project blog (that's right, an exact duplicate of what's on your team leader's blog). But you should wait until the project is complete before doing so.
• Important: I highly recommend that you keep backups of your work in MS Word or some other text editor.

Links:

• 30 links. Half of them (15) must be to other student projects.
• It's okay if several of the links are to the same student project; and several of the links may also be to earlier posts of your own that are relevant.

Blog: Project Blog.

Length: At least 3,000 words (roughly the equivalent of 6 type-written pages).