Design for Change Milestone 2 proposal: ACE Star model

Two instructions in the opening lines change how this paper should be written and both are easy to skim. The first is that you must **review the feedback you received on Milestone 1 and use it to develop this one** — so this is a revision task as much as a new piece of writing, and the marker has already told you where the earlier version was weak. Going back for that feedback before drafting is the cheapest improvement available. The second is a formatting rule with teeth: write an introduction but **do not head it 'Introduction'**, in accordance with APA. The first heading in your paper is therefore the change model overview, and a paper opening with an Introduction heading has broken a rule the brief spells out with a page reference. Both instructions appear before the section list, which is exactly where a reader in a hurry starts skimming.

The five section headings are the rubric, and they map onto the ACE Star Model's own points without saying so. Change Model Overview corresponds to establishing the framework and scope. Evidence covers Discovery and Summary. Translation covers Translation and Implementation. The Conclusion explicitly asks for the five points of the model to be summarised. Recognising that correspondence early stops the paper drifting into a general change-management essay with the ACE Star model mentioned once at the top, which is the most common shape of a weak submission here.

The Evidence section has a specific expectation buried in the rubric wording rather than in the instructions, and it is worth extracting: the rubric's own illustration is *there have been six urinary tract infections over the last two months*. That tells you what kind of evidence is wanted — **local numbers demonstrating that a change is needed here**, not only published literature showing that a problem exists somewhere. The instruction to conduct internal *and* external searches says the same thing. A proposal built entirely on journal articles has done half the search and has not established that this unit has the problem. If your unit genuinely has no data on the problem, that absence is itself worth reporting, because it is a finding about the organisation rather than a gap in your search.

Translation is where proposals become vague and the brief pre-empts it by naming four things: a hypothetical action plan, measurable outcomes, reporting to stakeholders, and next steps with dissemination. The word *hypothetical* is permission rather than licence — you are not expected to have run this, but you are expected to describe something that could be run. That means the measurable outcomes need a numerator, a denominator and a time frame, and the reporting needs an audience and an interval. 'Outcomes will be monitored and reported to stakeholders' satisfies none of the four items while appearing to address them all. Write one outcome properly and the pattern for the others follows; write them all loosely and the Translation section reads as intention throughout.

Two mechanical points that carry marks. The paper is four to six pages excluding title and reference pages, in APA sixth edition — an older edition than most current courses use, so check your heading levels and reference formats against the manual the brief names rather than against habit. And tables and figures are explicitly invited and must be embedded in the body rather than appended. A single table showing your local baseline figures against the benchmark, or the action plan as a timeline, does more for the Evidence and Translation sections than an extra paragraph would, and the brief has already told you it is welcome. Check the edition question early rather than at the formatting stage, because sixth-edition running heads and heading levels differ from seventh in ways that are tedious to retrofit across six pages.