2 Refining your opportunity for change

After identifying and justifying a specific organisational context, further refining your research topic is the next step towards completing your change project. First off, you need to identify a problem in your work context. In conventional research method terms, this is translated to looking for and narrowing down a research topic (in your case, a problem or change to be implemented) and developing research questions (in your case, questions for your project that will help you address the problem that you have identified).

For some, choosing the project topic is easy because they have a very specific interest in an area. For example, you might be interested in studying training and development systems in multinational companies or you might have a management issue you want to address, such as why the career progression of women in the construction industry is slower than men’s in the same industry. Alternatively, your sponsoring organisation might like you to carry out a specific project that will benefit the organisation itself. For example, it might need a specific customer service policy to be developed.

You may also find the process of refining the research topic daunting and frustrating. In the next activity you will create a mindmap to help you to define your research topic further.

Activity 2 Clarifying your research topic

Timing: Allow around 20 minutes for this activity

Create a mindmap to identify the stakeholders – people who have a stake in the change, or who might block it – along with any other factors that may impact on your proposed change.

Maximise

Figure 2 An example mindmap identifying potential stakeholders

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A mindmap with ‘Stakeholders’ written in a circle in the centre. The circle has six lines coming off of it, which lead to circles that read: Board of directors, Development, Support team, Management, Professional services, Customer, Project leader.

Off of the ‘Development’ circle are two further circles: Development director (key planner) and Scrum teams (keep informed).

Off of the ‘Support team’ circle are three further circles: Project workstreams (key planner), Advice line (keep informed) and Technical support (keep informed).

Off of the ‘Management’ circle are four further circles: Marketing manager (key planner), Sales director (key planner), Operations supervisor (keep satisfied) and Customer service manager (key planner).

Off of the ‘Professional services’ circle are five further circles: Finance services (keep satisfied),Legal office (minimal effort), Personnel (keep informed), Strategic planning and change (keep satisfied) and Procurement (minimal effort).

Off of the ‘Customer’ circle are two further circles: Sponsor (key planner) and Product user group (keep informed).

There are no lines off of the ‘Board of directors’ circle.

Figure 2 An example mindmap identifying potential stakeholders

This can help you to become more focused about what you want to achieve. It can also sometimes tell you that your change may be better achieved in small steps, particularly if it will affect a number of people and stakeholders, or if there is likely to be resistance to the change.

Discussing your project with colleagues and family may help as they may have suggestions that you have not considered. This activity will help you to visualise, structure and refine your research topic for your project.

Moving from a general research topic to a research question is a crucial step. The formulation and selection of research questions often involves a considerable amount of uncertainty and intuition (Campbell et al., 1982). Therefore, through your observations at your chosen organisational context, initial information screening, and general theory and literature search, you should be able to identify something that is currently poorly understood in your management practice. This gap could be of some value to your chosen organisation and could be converted into a defined research question.

Once you have identified your research topic, you can move on to work on developing research questions. This process is discussed in the next section.