C721: Change Management

C721 Change Management at Western Governors University explains why organizational change succeeds or fails, and how to recognize, implement and sustain it using proven theories and tools.

WGU's B.S. Accounting program guide lists the course at three competency units in term nine, and it appears in other business degrees too. The guide highlights change theories and best practices, innovation and leadership, and four stages: approaches to change, diagnosing and planning, implementing and sustaining change.

Students often know the models by name but struggle to apply them. The course rewards showing how a model fits a specific situation.

What C721 Covers

The guide lists six competencies:

Key Concepts Explained

Lewin's Three-Stage Model

Kurt Lewin described change as unfreezing (creating readiness), changing (moving to new ways of working) and refreezing (making the new way stick). It is simple, which makes it a good frame for short answers.

Kotter's Eight Steps

John Kotter's model starts with creating urgency and building a guiding coalition, moves through vision, communication, removing obstacles and short-term wins, and ends with consolidating gains and anchoring change in the culture.

ADKAR and Resistance

The ADKAR model focuses on the individual: awareness, desire, knowledge, ability and reinforcement. It helps explain resistance. Someone who understands the change but sees no benefit is stuck at desire, which needs a different response from someone stuck at ability.

Learning Organizations

Peter Senge described learning organizations through five disciplines: systems thinking, personal mastery, mental models, shared vision and team learning. They treat change as continuous rather than as an occasional project.

Typical Assignments and How to Approach Them

WGU assesses competency through performance assessments or objective assessments; your course page shows the current format. Typical work in this subject:

Structuring a Change Plan

Scenario tasks in this subject often ask for something close to a change plan. A clear structure keeps every stage of the course visible:

1. Diagnosis: the problem, its evidence and why change is needed now.
2. Approach: the change model you will use and why it fits this organization.
3. Stakeholders: who is affected, their likely reaction and their role.
4. Implementation: the main steps, communication and training.
5. Resistance: expected causes and targeted responses.
6. Sustainment: measures, reinforcement and how the change becomes part of the culture.

Keep each part tied to the scenario's facts. A plan that would fit any company usually reads as generic and misses the point of the diagnosis competency.

Where Students Get Stuck

• Listing steps without applying them. Show what each stage looks like in the scenario.
• Skipping diagnosis. Explain why change is needed before explaining how.
• Forgetting sustainment. Many plans stop at launch. The course explicitly covers sustaining change.
• Vague leadership roles. Name what leaders, managers and employees each do.

Study Tips for C721

• Make a comparison table of Lewin, Kotter and ADKAR: stages, focus, strengths and limits.
• Recall a change you lived through at work and map it onto each model.
• For each resistance cause, pair one practical response.
• Keep answers concrete: name the people, the measures and the timeline in the scenario.

How We Help with C721

Send the task instructions, rubric, scenario and any evaluator feedback. A management tutor prepares a custom response that applies a suitable change model, explains why it fits, or reviews your draft for missing elements such as diagnosis or sustainment.

GradeEssays is independent of Western Governors University. Our work is tutoring and reference material: use it to understand the approach, then write and submit your own work under WGU's academic integrity rules. We never log in to student portals. Every order is written from scratch, with free revisions within the scope of your original request.