Course Summaries

Graduate Certificate in Change Management

Approaches to Change

In this course you will learn some of the major frameworks that help you to understand and manage change. Starting with the change agent, you explore the skills needed and the types of analysis change agents use to decide appropriate courses of action. You will develop your skills and learn a range of different strategies for influencing individuals, groups and the organisation. Change is also considered from an organisational perspective and you will explore how organisations respond to, resist, initiate and drive change. Your role in understanding and managing the organisation is examined. By the end of the course you will be able to: Understand the main frameworks that describe personal and organisational change Identify the role you play in initiating and facilitating change Analyse effective and ineffective change interventions Choose appropriate strategies to facilitate personal and organisational change Sample Overview: Approaches to Change

Change Skills

This course reviews the essential skills of a change agent, including: Team building Communication Networking Conflict resolution Negotiation Process skills You will gain the confidence and self-knowledge to understand which of your current abilities are helpful and which skills you need to acquire or strengthen. The course helps you to develop an action plan around your change skills. Although you work in groups, your competence is assessed individually. Sample Overview: Change Skills

Redesigning the Organisation

This course focuses on the important structural and cultural elements of an organisation’s design, when and why the elements might need to be redesigned and how to redesign them effectively. We consider changes at the level of individual jobs through to strategic options such as mergers, downsizing and restructuring. There is no one perfect design, only an optimal design for each particular time and context. By the end of the course you will be able to: Describe the main features of organisations Assess an organisational design in relation to the strategy and the environment Apply an open-systems perspective to planning for change Identify appropriate interventions Recommend ways to improve the redesign process Sample Overview: Redesigning the Organisation

Systems for Change

This course examines how you can sustain change in yourself and your organisation and teaches you the skills to support both processes. You will learn the four-step action research method: Implement change Study and reflect on outcomes Design new interventions Continually assess the effectiveness of your actions The aim is to become competent in using an open-systems model to understand how organisations function. You will learn to analyse the extent to which systems enable and motivate sustainable change. About one-third of the course is devoted to applying skills to a current, action research project at your workplace. * GCCM students must have successfully completed the prerequisite course, Approaches to Change Sample Overview: Systems for Change