Somewhere in the middle of a negotiation course the writing moves from understanding the other party to building an offer. This stage typically asks you to design what you would trade: which elements of your practice change are fixed, which are adjustable, what each adjustment costs you, and how the pieces combine into a package the other party can accept without losing anything they cannot afford to lose. The graded skill is deliberate concession rather than improvised retreat. Your section may print this as NR 719 or NR719; it is the same course. Chamberlain publishes no syllabi outside Canvas. The placement here is our teaching judgment from the course's catalog arc; your section's rubric decides what your week actually asks.
What NR-719 Week 5 asks for
A medication reconciliation redesign on two medical-surgical units asked pharmacy technicians to complete admission histories for patients arriving through the emergency department after 1500. Pharmacy's counter was that they could staff it until 1900 and no later, which the project team read as a refusal of the evening block and treated as a wall for five weeks. It was not a wall. It was a resource statement, and it contained a trade that nobody had looked for. The unit's own arrival log showed that the after-1900 arrivals were concentrated on two nights of the week, following a scheduled surgical block. Pharmacy could cover those two nights if the other three came off the request, and in exchange wanted the reconciliation template shortened by three fields they considered redundant. The final arrangement covered 80 percent of the target arrivals, cost the project a template it was attached to, and was agreed in one meeting once the pieces were separated and priced.
That is the work of this stage. The deliverable tends to be a negotiation strategy or a proposal with options, sometimes framed as concession planning, sometimes as a set of alternatives at different scopes, sometimes as a memo presenting two or three ways forward. The scoring turns on whether your elements are genuinely separable and priced, or whether you have written one indivisible request and called the fallback a compromise.
Doctoral-level treatment requires two things students often skip. The first is clinical integrity: some elements of a practice change are not tradeable because they carry the effect. If the evidence supports a 48-hour follow-up window, moving it to two weeks to win agreement produces a program that is easier to approve and no longer the intervention. Say which elements are fixed and why, with the evidence attached. The second is honesty about your own preferences, since students routinely list as tradeable the things they never intended to give.
Expect the writing to be tight and structural. This is the stage where a table earns its place, because a reader needs to see element, current ask, adjustable range, cost of adjusting, and value to the other party in one view.
The NR-719 Week 5 method, step by step
Six moves for designing trades that hold up.
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Decompose the change into elements that can move independently
Scope, population, timing, staffing source, documentation burden, measurement, duration and who owns the work. Most requests contain eight or ten separable elements and are presented as one, which leaves the other party with only two answers.
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Classify each element as fixed, flexible or expendable
Fixed elements carry the clinical effect and are defended with evidence. Flexible elements can move within a range you name. Expendable elements exist mostly because you drafted them, and identifying them honestly is what gives you something to give.
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Price each concession in your own terms before the meeting
What does dropping this element cost in coverage, in effect size, in feasibility, in the measure you plan to report. A concession made without a price attached becomes a habit, and by the fourth one the project has quietly stopped being worth doing.
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Estimate what each element is worth to the other party
Value is asymmetric, and that asymmetry is where agreements are found. Elements that cost you little and relieve a real burden for them are the currency of this stage; find them before you enter the room and say how you identified them.
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Build two or three packages rather than a single position
Equivalent-value packages let a party choose rather than concede, which changes the psychology of the conversation and gives you information about their priorities from whichever one they engage with.
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Set the point at which you would decline rather than continue
Write the version of the agreement that would no longer deliver the outcome, and say plainly that you would not sign it. A negotiation without a stated floor drifts toward whatever the other party will approve, which is rarely the intervention you appraised.
A layout and word budget for a concession and package plan
Our frame for this stage, sized for roughly 1,000 to 1,300 words with the element detail carried in a table. This outline is ours rather than anything the university issues, and your week's rubric outranks it wherever the two disagree.
| Section | What belongs in it | Word target |
|---|---|---|
| Element decomposition | The change broken into independently movable parts, with a sentence on why each is separable. | 170 to 210 |
| Fixed elements and their evidence | The two or three components that carry the effect, each defended with a cited source rather than a preference. | 200 to 240 |
| Flexible range and prices | Each adjustable element with the range you can accept and what movement costs in coverage or effect. | 220 to 270 |
| Value to the other party | What each element relieves or costs them, and how you inferred it from their accountabilities. | 170 to 210 |
| Two or three packages | Combinations of roughly equivalent value to you, described so a party can choose between them. | 200 to 250 |
| The declining point | The version you would refuse, with the reason stated in outcome terms. | 100 to 140 |
Evidence craft for trade design
Defend fixed elements with sources, not conviction. If the follow-up window, the dose of the intervention or the population served is non-negotiable, the sentence that says so should carry a citation and a year. Otherwise fixed reads as stubborn, and a reasonable counterpart will test it.
Distinguish the intervention from its packaging. Implementation literature separates the active components of a change from the local arrangements around them, and that distinction is the intellectual basis for everything in this stage. Use it explicitly, with attribution, rather than reinventing it in your own words.
Price concessions in outcome units. Losing the three lowest-volume nights reduces covered admissions from an estimated 46 to 37 per week on this unit's own arrival log is a priced concession. Some reduction in coverage is a sentence that lets a project be negotiated away one small step at a time.
Attribute any figure to the record it came from. Scheduling reports, arrival logs, staffing rosters and event counts are all defensible sources when named. In a negotiation document, a number without a source is the first thing a counterpart will decline to accept.
Write the other party's constraint as a fact, not a complaint. Pharmacy can staff to 1900 within its current budgeted hours is a working constraint you can design around. Pharmacy is unwilling to extend coverage is the same situation written in a way that produces no options.
Five mistakes that cost points in this week's territory
- An indivisible request. If your change cannot be decomposed, you have not analyzed it; almost every practice change has separable timing, scope and burden.
- Everything declared essential. A plan in which no element is expendable gives the other party nothing to win and usually ends in stalemate.
- Trading away the active ingredient. Concessions that preserve the appearance of the intervention while removing the mechanism produce an approved program that cannot work.
- Unpriced concessions. Vague willingness to be flexible is not a plan, and it reads as a writer who has not thought about consequences.
- One position and a retreat. Presenting a single ask with a weaker version behind it is not package design; the weaker version simply becomes the new starting point.
Before you submit
- The change is decomposed into elements that genuinely move independently
- Fixed elements are named and defended with cited evidence
- Every flexible element has a range and a stated cost of moving
- Value to the other party is inferred from accountabilities, not assumed
- At least two packages of roughly equivalent value are offered
- Every number carries the record it came from
- The point at which you would decline is stated in outcome terms
Building the offer for NR-719?
Send the rubric and your case out of Canvas. A premium original draft comes back in 24 to 48 hours with elements decomposed, concessions priced and packages built rather than a single ask with a retreat behind it, and revisions run until the grade lands.