Managing Change
Individual Project

What is the change agent's relationship to the organization?
What change is this person involved in making?
What motivated this person to become involved in this particular change?
How did the change agent initiate change?
Who else was involved in the change? What were their relationships to the change agent?
What strategies were effective or ineffective? What made them so?
In hindsight, what could have been done differently?

Context

My change agent, worked as technical consultant in a company, Transarc, which designed and built middleware. When he was sent to Portugal, he simply had to give a demonstration for one of these middleware products. But the Portuguese company didn't want a demonstration of his middleware, they asked him another project: to reconsider the system of family subsidies and unemployment. Three months later his company won the project and my change agent went to Portugal with one junior colleague. During his mission my change agent was constantly in touch with his bosses (in his company and in the client) and he also had assistance in this company.

He participated in this project as main person in charge of the technical organization of the project. In this project, the function of the informatics was to accelerate processes: when my change agent is entered in this company, it needed to wait three months before having reports of the transactions. Thus, people who had cheated had disappeared when the company realized it. Furthermore, it was necessary to improve the service to the public, because response times was too long. So, his first objectives was to build an up to date processing system, to restructure the communications network, and to train the staff at the appropriate level.

Background

The Instituto de Informatica e Estatistica da Solidariedade used to be a governement department but it had been spun off has an institute. This institute was self-sufficient and self-funding.