Organisation design and change management postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My final-year project began with a question I could not answer from a textbook. A three-site bakery near my university had merged its two production teams into one rota, and staff turnover rose sharply in the six months afterwards. With the owner's permission I interviewed seven employees and the two supervisors, and mapped how decisions about ordering, cleaning and cover had moved between roles. The structure on paper looked simpler. In practice, one supervisor had absorbed scheduling for people she had never worked alongside, and informal favours that used to smooth over late deliveries had quietly stopped. Writing that up taught me that design choices are rarely wrong in the abstract; they fail where nobody has traced who will actually hold the work.

That project shaped what I read afterwards. Mintzberg's account of organisational configurations helped me see the bakery as a structure caught between a simple owner-led setup and something more formalised, without the coordinating mechanisms the larger form needs. I also found Kotter's stage model useful as a checklist but limited as a description, because the bakery's difficulties were not caused by resistance or poor communication so much as by an unclear division of labour. I would like to study change with more precision than a single model allows, particularly work on how routines form and how discretion at the front line affects whether a redesign holds.

My degree gave me the analytical side: modules in organisational behaviour, operations and human resource management, plus a statistics course that I initially found difficult and ended up enjoying once I had to run my own interview coding and a small survey. I scored highest in the modules that involved real cases, and my dissertation supervisor encouraged me to consider postgraduate study on the strength of the fieldwork.

Alongside my studies I have supervised shifts in a garden centre café for three years, and I now open the site two mornings a week. The job is ordinary, but it has been a steady education in how structures behave under pressure. When the kitchen moved to a new ordering system last spring, the written process assumed one person would check stock before close. On busy weekends that person was always serving, so checks drifted to the morning and orders arrived late. I suggested splitting the task between the closing supervisor and the earliest opener, and drafted a short handover card. Waste dropped noticeably over the following months and the manager kept the card in use. It was a small change, but it came from watching where the work genuinely sat rather than where the process said it should.

I have had similar lessons volunteering with a community netball club, where I look after membership records and subscription reminders. When the club grew from two teams to four, the single volunteer coordinating fixtures was overwhelmed. We agreed to give each team a contact who handles their own availability and reports to one fixtures lead. Persuading people to take on the role mattered more than the diagram; two coaches only agreed once they saw the task written down and bounded. That experience made me more careful about assuming capacity exists simply because a structure requires it.

What I want from postgraduate study is a firmer theoretical grounding and better methods for diagnosing organisations, including how to gather evidence without leaning only on interviews with the people who commissioned the change. In the longer term I hope to work in internal change or organisational development roles, probably starting in an analyst or coordinator position in a large employer, and to keep working close enough to operations that I can see whether a redesign actually functions. I am applying now because I have enough practical observation to test ideas against, and enough unanswered questions to make a year of concentrated study worthwhile.

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