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Annual Meetings
University of Michigan, 2001

Notes:  Meeting and Managing Change

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Principles and Concerns

• Reasons for change
  1. to meet internal goals
  2. to further careers
  3. to respond to political / environmental concerns
  4. to respond to student concerns / attitudes
  5. to reach more of an audience
  6. to retain / expand our services and our role in the educational process
  7. to avail ourselves of tools we didn't have before
• We know what is the right thing to do (our goals and purposes for advising in the educational setting) - but how to explain what we're doing (to argue our own importance, to lobby for institutional support)
• If you change out of fear (new provost, etc. demanding change from above), THAT is a hard change to monitor and "manage"
• With lower financial resources, we have to somehow offer more programs / meet more needs with smaller staff, do we have to combine programs so change might be: "... it's a tough budget; achieve excellence anyway."
• Budget issues: if you go to head count - based budgeting, units start to compete with each other for the students - programs which had started with upper-division students now would want to admit some freshman, etc.
• Change:
  1. Internal - directed
  2. external - directed
  3. reactive (imposed from outside)
  4. proactive (what we want to do)
• How do we manage it?
• You put change in: in intended course still trying to know what all the pieces are still trying to evaluate if it's working
• Then you get outside help to evaluate and also to continue helping the staff going through the changes to adapt - to alter attitudes 0 to re-affirm the goals
• Then you need to see the actual costs and benefits (for one thing, to see if some people bear the cost but some others get all the benefits), in your evaluation, you may see that someone else has to change - the how do you acquire the leverage to make that happen (we're given a new data system - some part of it don't work - while we're adopting to it, see the good parts, make do with the not, how do we get the system provider to embrace change, too?)
• So change is best done in the layer co of the layer system or institution - love to know the likely repercussions of the change you want to make
• You see and set your goal - you define a way to reach it - you evaluate that - you teach the doers (staff) and the audience (students and maybe the money people) all along the way about the goals and the justifications for them
• Cooperation is critical - can people agree on what is being done, what is being thought even if there is more than one budget involved?

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Last revised March 5, 2002