Committee Structure Change Requests

This article will cover how to change your committee structure. If you wish to add, amend, retire, or revive roles to your committee please read on.

Changes to committee positions and role descriptions are a change to constitutions and need to be voted on by your Club members. There are two options for your vote: 

• A two thirds majority of a quorate general meeting of the CSP

or 

• A unanimous vote of a CSP's committee, if there are no objections from the CSP’s membership (the changes must be circulated to your membership) 

Process 

1. Changes approved by the CSP members at a General Meeting.
2. Committee Structure Change Request is submitted by a CSP principal officer (Chair/Secretary/Treasurer). 
3. Management Group reviews and approves changes.
4. The Union records and updates this information in its system. This will then show online and be included in elections.

How to submit a Committee Structure Change Request 

To start a new request, navigate to: Administration > Clubs Societies & Projects > Documentation

And open the ‘Constitution & Committee’ pink tab. This should redirect you to the ‘New Submission’ tab by default. If you already have pending requests, you can view them through the ‘Previous Requests’ pink tab.

Once you’ve started a request, there are a number of fields you must complete, as detailed below.

Compulsory Tabs

The compulsory request fields are as follows:

• Committee: The CSP you are making changes to. This is automatically populated based on the role you are in, so you won’t need to change anything here.
• Summary of Changes: You should fill this in with a brief description of the changes you are making, such as ‘Add new Social Secretary position’ or ‘Update role descriptions for entire committee’. Try to keep this summary concise. You can use the ‘Additional Notes’ field for any extra information you wish to communicate to the Management Group,
• Date of CSP general meeting where approved: All changes must be approved by the CSP at a general meeting. You can start a request before having this meeting, but you must hold this meeting and record the date here before committing the request. If this field is left blank when the request is committed, the Management Group will reject the request.
• Date of MG meeting where approved: This field will be completed by the Management Group.
• Additional Notes: Use this to convey any extra details the Management Group may need when approving the request, or to record the rationale for the changes being made to help future committee members understand why the changes were made when viewing historical requests.

Update Tabs

The tabs for updating the positions are as follows:

• Positions List: This lists all Current, Inactive, and New positions for your committee, showing both the Original and Newly updated information for the positions and any change to the state. The position names under the ‘New Position Name’ column links through to the ‘Position Details’ tab.
• Position Details: This is the tab where you can edit and make changes to a specific position. This tab is described in detail below.
• Add / Remove New Positions: This tab allows you to add new positions which can then be edited in detail in the ‘Position Details’ tab. This tab will also let you remove any newly created positions that aren’t required. Note: you can’t remove existing positions with this tab – retire existing positions by changing their status in the ‘Position Details’ tab instead.

Position Details

The ‘Position Details’ tab is where you make changes. This tab will also show you all the original information about the position in read-only format. Changes can be made through the following fields:

• New Position Type: This allows you to choose a new position type for a given position. For new positions, this defaults to ‘Committee Member (Other Roles)’. As every club must have a chair and treasurer, there must be a position with the ‘Chair/President/Captain (Principal Officer)’ type and there must be a position with the ‘Junior Treasurer’ type – if you make a request which would result in there being no positions with these types it will be rejected by the Management Group and the change will not be enacted by the Union. If you’re unsure which position type to use for a given position, seek advice from your Management Group or the Student Activities team.
• New Position Name: Use this to rename a position or name a new position for the first time. The first instance is intended for minor changes to a position’s name, in which the position itself doesn’t fundamentally change (e.g. renaming ‘Events Manager’ to ‘Head of Events’), or has clear continuity to the original version of the position. It shouldn’t be used to change a position to something completely unrelated (e.g. changing ‘Web Officer’ to ‘1^st Team Captain’). If this is your intention, you should instead retire the old position and then create a new one from scratch.
• New Role Description: Provide the details of the duties and responsibilities of the position.
• New Quantity Elected: Use this to change the number of people normally elected to this position. For example, if your committee has three ‘ordinary members’ who each have the same set of duties responsibilities, then you would add or update a position with name ‘Ordinary Member’ and set the Number Elected to 3.
• Change Status: Use this field to retire current positions or reactivate inactive positions. To retire a current position, change the field from ‘Unchanged Remains Active’ (the default) to ‘Retire position’. To reactivate an inactive position, change the field from ‘Unchanged - Remains Inactive’ to ‘Reactivate position’. New positions will show ‘New position’ in this field with no other possible options – if you wish to remove a new position use the ‘Add/Remove New Positions’ tab.

Submitting a Request

Once you have completed making changes and are ready to submit the request, use the ‘Commit’ button to send the request to the Management Group for review and approval. 

FAQs

Q. My Management Group does not have officers in post, who will review my request?

A. The Deputy President (Clubs & Societies) can review and approve the request instead. Email them on DPCS@imperial.ac.uk 

Q. How many change requests can I submit at once?

A. Only one ‘change’ request may exist at a time. If another officer in your CSP has already started working on a request or a request is currently pending with the Management Group, you won’t be able to start a new request until the one before is completed.

Q. What about positions that aren’t elected to?

A. If, for exceptional reasons, you have positions in your CSP that aren’t elected for, then these will not be included in and cannot be added to the change request – you should continue to contact Student Activities about these positions.

Do you need help?

Management Group Committee/ Constituent Union Committee: Your MG Chair/CU Committee is trained to help you with this topic. Please find your relevant contact here

Union Email Contact:  activities@imperial.ac.uk 

Contact: Student Opportunities and Development Coordinators

121 Session: Available for this topic, book here