Master of Public Administration for Senior Leadership

Date

5-2026

Document Type

Capstone

Degree Name

Master’s in Project Management

Department

School of Professional Studies

Chief Instructor

Mary M. Piecewicz, MBA, MSPC, PMP

Keywords

organizational readiness for change, trajectory-based assessment, change viability, absorptive capacity, sensemaking, organizational slack, small organizations, readiness vector, transformation window

Abstract

Most organizational transformations do not fail loudly. They fade, fragment, and quietly exhaust the people expected to sustain them. What practitioners often diagnose as resistance, poor adoption, or weak execution may begin earlier, with an untested assumption that the organization is stable, coherent, and capable enough to absorb planned change. Existing change frameworks offer useful guidance for implementation, but they do not formally ask whether the organization is currently moving in a direction, and with enough stability, to make planned change viable.

This capstone introduces Bounded Transformation: From Static Readiness to Trajectory-Based Change Viability, a trajectory-based pre-condition framework for assessing whether planned change should proceed before a change plan is built. The framework defines organizational trajectory as the direction and stability of movement across six observable dimensions over time. These dimensions are Learning Absorption, Sensemaking Clarity, Operational Load, Leadership Coherence, Process and Coordination Stability, and Adaptive Bandwidth. Together, they produce a Readiness Vector that helps determine whether the transformation window is open, narrowing, or closed.

The framework draws on absorptive capacity theory, sensemaking theory, and organizational slack to argue that readiness is not only a current-state condition. It is also a movement-based viability judgment. Small organizations serve as the critical case because limited slack, overlapping roles, informal coordination, concentrated tacit knowledge, and weak formal change infrastructure make trajectory-blind decisions especially consequential.

The capstone delivers four integrated artifacts: a theoretical framework, a monthly pulse assessment, a quarterly formal assessment, and a Google Colab decision model that translates assessment inputs into a Readiness Vector, Transformation Window, Dominant Constraint, and Pathway Recommendation. The contribution is theoretical, methodological, operational, and practical. Before change can be managed, it must first be judged viable.

This capstone concept and original framework idea were developed by the author; AI tools were used to support refinement, organization, drafting, and compilation.

Worcester

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