GB740 Unit 10 Development Report Example

Where the Margin Went: A Unit 10 Organizational Development Report for a Civil Engineering Firm

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

GB740: Organizational Development

Unit 10 Development Report

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

Tallis Engineering, its people and every figure are composite and illustrative; the models and sources cited are real.

Executive Summary

At Tallis Engineering, projects closed in 2025 lost a median of 5.8 points of margin between proposal and completion. This report argues that the loss sits mostly on jobs that borrow staff from other offices, whose median fade of 8.9 points was close to three times the single-office figure, and that the cause is a misfit between work that now crosses office lines and a formal organization that still rewards each office separately. Four changes to the formal organization are proposed: shared margin credit, a resourcing forum with binding authority, a lower project manager utilization target with coordination priced into proposals and a project manager council. They will be introduced to the offices in three waves set by lottery, which allows the effect on fade to be measured against offices still waiting. Success means a reduction of at least two points in median multi-office fade within a year of each office's start.

Entry and Contracting

The project began with two framings. The chief executive saw a skills gap among project managers and had announced a training academy. The chief operating officer, who became the sponsor, asked why margins fade. The contract, built on the distinction Block (2011) draws between what each party wants and what each offers, gave the candidate access to records for 212 closed projects, a firmwide survey, forty interviews, observation of staffing calls and a biweekly hour with the sponsor. Three matters were left open in writing: how findings touching the acquired principals' earnouts would be handled, how disagreements between candidate and sponsor would be resolved and who would tell the chief executive if the academy was not supported. All three later arose.

Diagnosis

The congruence model of Nadler and Tushman (1980) was chosen over Burke-Litwin and Weisbord's six boxes because it explained why the problem appeared after the firm's two acquisitions and because its central prediction could be tested against project records before any interview. The records confirmed it. Eighty-seven of the closed projects used staff from two or more offices, and the difference in fade held across fee bands, client types and projects with and without large change orders.

Three further findings explained the mechanism. Project managers on multi-office projects reported about 14 unbilled coordination hours a week, against about 5 on single-office work, because the 82 percent utilization target penalized coordination. Staff loans between offices were settled as favors in five of six observed staffing calls, with no written procedure. And eight of ten office leaders described lending staff as a cost to their own results, which the bonus plan, based on office profit, confirmed. A fourth finding, higher role ambiguity in acquired offices, was supported by the survey alone.

What Feedback Changed

The diagnostic findings went first to staff in twelve office sessions, then to office leaders and last to the executive team, following the principle set out by Nadler (1977) that people who supply data should work with it before others interpret it. The sessions changed two findings, and the report records both.

The favor economy was reframed. The original reading of the staffing calls described office leaders as hoarding staff. In four sessions, technical staff and project managers objected. They described favors as a working system of reciprocity that had kept multi-office projects staffed for years in the absence of any formal process, and they warned that replacing it carelessly could make staffing worse. The finding was softened: the problem is not that leaders refuse to lend, but that lending depends on relationships, so offices without them, mostly the acquired ones, wait longer. The resourcing forum was redesigned to let offices settle requests between themselves first and to escalate only unresolved ones.

A new cause appeared. In two of the three acquired water offices, project accountants pointed out that hours are still entered under the practice's pre-acquisition job numbers, which are mapped to Tallis projects only at month end. Monthly estimates of margin at completion on projects involving those offices were therefore based on incomplete hours, and fade appeared late and suddenly when the mapping caught up. This explained part of the higher fade on multi-office projects involving the water group, and it was a cause the diagnosis had not looked for. Migrating those offices to the firm's codes was added to the plan as a precondition for their wave.

Two findings changed because the people who supplied the data read it first, which is the strongest argument this report can offer for the order in which feedback was given.

Intervention

The four interventions respond to the four findings, as Unit 7 set out. Three of them change the formal organization, and only the council is a human process intervention. The academy remains, reduced to a single module that teaches coordination budgeting.

Stakeholder Costs

The stakeholder analysis priced each group's losses and changed the proposal twice. Senior engineers in scarce specialties would have been overloaded, so assignments to other offices are capped at 40 percent of their hours without their agreement. Acquired principals' earnouts depend on office profit through 2027, so a parallel ledger calculates their profit both ways and pays on the higher figure, at a cost of no more than $90,000 a year. Office leaders at the four largest offices would lose between $6,000 and $14,000 in bonus, partly offset by a new component for requests filled through the forum.

Evaluation

The evaluation uses the rollout as a stepped design, in which offices still waiting serve as comparisons at each step (Hussey & Hughes, 2007). Its main measure is how far a multi-office project's margin has slipped by its sixth month, read against two years of history. Secondary measures track the mechanism: hours worked across offices, days to fill requests, turnover, role ambiguity and unfilled requests by specialty. The plan states that twelve offices can detect only a large effect and names four rival explanations: attention, contamination between offices, market change and the timing of the acquired offices' wave.

Reflexivity

The candidate spent eleven years at the water practice before Tallis acquired it and remains, in the firm's language, legacy. Coghlan and Brannick (2014) describe the risk that an insider's preunderstanding shapes what they see, and the record suggests it did once. The candidate's first reading of the staffing calls, as hoarding by headquarters offices, matched a view the candidate had held before the project began, and it was staff in the feedback sessions, not the candidate's own review, that corrected it. The accounting codes finding cuts the other way: it located part of the problem in the candidate's own former firm, and the candidate had not suspected it. A faculty adviser reviewed interpretations throughout, as agreed at contracting.

What Remains Uncertain

Everything here comes from a single round of interviews and records for two years of closed work. Whether the changes cut fade will not be clear for about eighteen months. The history Walton (1975) recounts is a reminder that changes which succeed early can revert when attention moves, which is why each intervention has been written into the bonus plan, the budget or the human resources system rather than left to the sponsor's commitment.

References

Block, P. (2011). Flawless consulting: A guide to getting your expertise used (3rd ed.). Pfeiffer.

Coghlan, D., & Brannick, T. (2014). Doing action research in your own organization (4th ed.). SAGE.

Hussey, M. A., & Hughes, J. P. (2007). Design and analysis of stepped wedge cluster randomized trials. Contemporary Clinical Trials, 28(2), 182-191. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cct.2006.05.007

Nadler, D. A. (1977). Feedback and organization development: Using data-based methods. Addison-Wesley.

Nadler, D. A., & Tushman, M. L. (1980). A model for diagnosing organizational behavior. Organizational Dynamics, 9(2), 35-51. https://doi.org/10.1016/0090-2616(80)90039-X

Walton, R. E. (1975). The diffusion of new work structures: Explaining why success didn't take. Organizational Dynamics, 3(3), 3-22. https://doi.org/10.1016/0090-2616(75)90027-3