| Course | BU 427 Change Management |
|---|---|
| Unit | Unit 1 |
| Paper type | Change driver brief |
| Length | About 830 words, 6 pages |
| Format | APA 7 student paper |
| School | Herzing University |
| Program | BS in Business Management |
| Updated | September 2026 |
Free sample paper for BU 427 Unit 1
The Handhelds Stop Being Supported Before the Readers Retire: A Change Driver Brief for a Composite Wisconsin Municipal Utility Still Reading 14,800 Meters by Hand
Student Name
Business, Herzing University
BU 427: Change Management
Instructor Name
January 14, 2026
The Handhelds Stop Being Supported Before the Readers Retire: A Change Driver Brief for a Composite Wisconsin Municipal Utility Still Reading 14,800 Meters by Hand
The Organization
Cedar Prairie Municipal Utilities, a composite organization created for this course, supplies electricity and water to a Wisconsin city of about 32,000 people. It is owned by the city and governed by a utility commission appointed by the council. It employs 71 people, including 9 meter readers, 6 customer service representatives, 3 billing clerks and a line and water crew. Every month the meter readers walk or drive routes to read about 14,800 electric meters and 11,200 water meters with handheld devices that record each reading for billing.
Much about the utility has been stable for decades. Rates change slowly, turnover is low and most of the meter readers have walked the same routes for more than ten years. Customers know them by name. That stability is part of what this brief has to account for, because the pressures described below all point toward replacing manual reading with automated meters that report usage over a radio network, and the people whose daily work would change most are the ones who have been there longest.
External Pressures
Four pressures come from outside the utility. Each is listed with the evidence that it is real and whether it is growing.
| Pressure | Evidence | Direction |
|---|---|---|
| The handheld reading system loses vendor support | The vendor's notice ends software updates and repairs in December 2027 | Fixed date, 23 months away |
| Complaints about estimated winter bills | 1,940 bills, about 13% of electric accounts, were estimated in January 2026 when snow blocked meters; 410 needed correcting | Recurs every winter |
| Neighboring utilities have automated | Three nearby municipal utilities installed automated meters in the past five years, and customers compare | Growing |
| Customer expectation of usage data | The service desk logged 280 requests in 2025 for daily or hourly usage, which the utility cannot supply | Growing |
Internal Pressures
Four pressures come from inside. Some are what staff already complain about, and some are visible only to managers.
The meter reading workforce is aging. Five of the nine readers will be eligible to retire within three years, and the last two hires took about seven months each to find and train. Staff talk about this openly; the readers themselves mention it.
The electric meters are wearing out. About 2,100 electromechanical meters are more than 20 years old, and the share failing the utility's accuracy tests rose from 1.2 percent in 2022 to 3.4 percent in 2025. This is a management concern that most staff never see.
Billing clerks spend about a third of January and February correcting estimated bills, which delays other work and generates about 620 customer calls each winter. The clerks and customer service representatives complain about this loudly.
Outages are found only when customers phone. The line crew and managers know that a meter able to report when power stops would shorten outage response, but nobody outside operations raises it.
Ranking by How Soon Each Pressure Forces a Decision
The pressures are ranked by timing rather than size. A large pressure five years out competes poorly for a commission's attention with a smaller one due next year, and organizations tend to act on whatever arrives first. Cawsey et al. (2016) advise change leaders to understand the timing of pressures as well as their strength, because timing determines how much room there is to prepare people.
| Rank | Pressure | When it forces a decision |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Handheld system loses support | A replacement must be chosen by mid-2026 to be working by December 2027 |
| 2 | Estimated winter bills | Every January; the commission hears complaints each winter |
| 3 | Reader retirements | Two to three years, with seven months to replace each reader |
| 4 | Aging meters | Three to five years, as failure rates climb |
| 5 | Neighboring utilities automated | No deadline; adds weight to the others |
| 6 | Usage data requests | No deadline; growing slowly |
| 7 | Outage detection | No deadline; a benefit rather than a pressure |
The ranking shows why the question has arrived now. Replacing the handhelds with another handheld system would answer the first pressure alone. Automated meters would answer the first, second, third and fourth at once, which is why managers already talk about them as the likely response. Armenakis et al. (1993) describe the gap between the current state and a needed state as the discrepancy that makes change believable to employees. At Cedar Prairie that gap is clear to managers and to the billing staff but not yet to the people whose work would change most. Outage detection sits last for a related reason. It may prove the largest benefit in the long run, yet no one is forced to decide anything by it, and a commission deciding under a vendor deadline will weigh it only after the pressures with dates attached. Listing it at the bottom keeps it visible without pretending it drives the timing.
Who Feels the First Change
The nine meter readers would feel it first and most. Their work today is to walk or drive assigned routes, find each meter, record the reading, note damaged or blocked meters and report tampering. With automated meters most of that work stops; readings would arrive over the network, and the remaining field work would be installing, testing and repairing meters and investigating the exceptions the system flags. That is different work requiring different skills, and fewer people to do it.
So far the readers have had almost no notice. The vendor's end-of-support letter went to the operations manager in November 2025, and the readers have heard about it only as rumor. Kotter (1995) warns that change efforts often stall because leaders underestimate how hard it is to move people out of their comfort zones, and here the readers' comfort zone is also a job many have held for more than a decade. The next group affected is the customer service and billing staff, whose winter workload would fall while the questions they answer would become more technical. The utility, its staff and its figures are composites for this course; nothing here describes a real utility.
References
Armenakis, A. A., Harris, S. G., & Mossholder, K. W. (1993). Creating readiness for organizational change. Human Relations, 46(6), 681-703. https://doi.org/10.1177/001872679304600601
Cawsey, T. F., Deszca, G., & Ingols, C. (2016). Organizational change: An action-oriented toolkit (3rd ed.). SAGE.
Kotter, J. P. (1995). Leading change: Why transformation efforts fail. Harvard Business Review, 73(2), 59-67.
BU 427 Unit 1 instructions, in plain terms
The first BU 427 assignment asks students to explain why an organization needs to change. Typical prompts call for a sketch of the organization, a list of external and internal pressures with evidence for each, some way of prioritizing them and an account of who in the workforce would be affected first. Students may use a composite organization or a public one; a current employer is usually discouraged. Instructors expect the brief to diagnose rather than prescribe, so remedies and change models are held for later units. Length is commonly two to four pages with a table or two, formatted in APA 7. The strongest submissions tie each pressure to evidence and describe affected roles by the work people actually do.
How the BU 427 Unit 1 example is put together
The sample introduces Cedar Prairie through its size, ownership, staff and the stability that makes change hard. A table of external pressures gives each one evidence and a direction, from the vendor's end-of-support date to growing requests for usage data. Internal pressures follow in separate paragraphs, noting which ones staff complain about and which only managers see. A ranking table then orders all pressures by when each forces a decision, with a paragraph on why outage detection sits last despite its long-run value. The ranking is linked to the likely response, automated meters, without proposing it. The closing section describes what the readers do now, what would stop, how little notice they have had, and which group is affected next.
Reading the BU 427 Unit 1 rubric
Herzing's rubric for the driver brief usually awards points for describing the organization, identifying and supporting external and internal drivers, prioritizing them with a clear rationale, and analyzing the human impact, with writing and APA as a final criterion. The driver criteria reward evidence attached to each pressure, not generic trends such as technology or globalization. Prioritization earns full credit when the ranking method is stated and applied consistently. The human impact criterion is where many briefs fall short; top scores go to papers that name roles, describe the work that would change and say how much the affected people already know. Keeping the brief diagnostic, with no premature plan, is often rewarded as evidence that the student understands the course's sequence.
BU 427 Unit 1 help: mistakes that cost points
Driver briefs often lose points by listing pressures with no evidence, so a reader cannot tell a documented fact from a guess. Another common weakness is mixing external and internal pressures in one list, which hides the difference in how each must be answered. Students frequently rank pressures by how large they sound rather than by when they force a decision, which misses why organizations act when they do. Many briefs jump to a solution and spend half their length on it. Some describe the workforce only by department names, never by the tasks people would stop doing. Finally, writing about a real current employer with internal details raises confidentiality problems that a composite organization avoids entirely.
Get a BU 427 Unit 1 example written to your instructions
Send the Unit 1 instructions and the rubric your BU 427 classroom posts, plus the organization or scenario the assignment names. We write a custom example that separates external from internal pressure, evidences each one, ranks them by timing and ends on the people the first change would reach. First custom sample free, back in 24 to 48 hours.
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BU 427 Unit 1 questions, answered
Can I write about my own workplace?
Only in the general terms anyone outside it could already observe, and many instructions discourage it for good reason. Restructuring plans, internal reports, performance data and what colleagues have said about a change are the employer's and are off limits in a submission. A composite organization built to behave like yours carries the same analysis without putting anything protected on a page.
How many drivers should the brief cover?
Four to six usually gives the ranking something to do without turning the document into an inventory. Fewer than three and the ordering is trivial. What matters is that each one is specific to the organization described, because a driver applying equally to every employer in the country adds length and takes space from the pressures explaining this situation.
Does the brief need a change model?
Not usually at this stage, and reaching for one early tends to bend the diagnosis toward whatever the model expects to find. Sections differ, so check the instructions. Where a model is called for, use it to organize the pressures rather than to prescribe a response, and leave the naming of any remedy to the units that ask for one.
Where can I find a free BU 427 Unit 1 sample paper?
The full BU 427 Unit 1 change driver brief is on this page for free, including the pressure tables, the timing-based ranking and margin notes. If your organization or industry differs, send the assignment and a custom brief is drafted at no charge, usually within two days.
Should BU 427 Unit 1 recommend a change?
Generally not. This unit grades diagnosis. The sample names automated meters as the likely response and shows which pressures it would answer, but it proposes nothing and leaves model choice and planning to later units.