MBA404 Consumer Behaviour and Marketing Psychology Assignment Sample

Once your workshop facilitator has validated your product or service choice, you are required to prepare a 1200-word written analysis by providing the reader with an in-depth analysis of how you have moved through each of the consumer decision-making steps.

In preparing your written analysis, you will also need to identify any possible issues that may have occurred during this process. Please use ‘Workshop 2 Student Handout’ as a starting point for your analysis in online assignment help.

More specifically in your descriptive essay help online, you must:

1. Analyse the need and want that led you to purchase the chosen product or service.

2. Examine the internal and external sources of information you used to purchase the chosen product or service. Please include screenshots of external sources of information to support your analysis and indicate your awareness set at the end of this section.

3. Evaluate alternatives and narrow down the chosen product or service attributes that satisfy your need and want. Please provide a detailed evoked set diagram to present your findings.

4. Analyse available purchase methods to determine how these methods impacted your decision-making process.

5. Analyse your post-purchase behaviour by identifying the chosen product or service features that reduce your cognitive dissonance. Please note that in this step, the topic of customer satisfaction should not be considered.
The findings presented in the written analysis must be based on primary research and should be reinforced by examining relevant secondary data. You must also incorporate theories and concepts related to consumer behaviour discussed in weeks 1, 2, 3 and 4.

You are required to use at least 5 sources of information and reference. These may include websites, social media sites industry reports, census data, journal articles, and newspaper articles. These references should be presented as in-text citations and a reference list at the end of your written analysis (not included I the word limit). Wikipedia and other ‘popular’ sites are not to be used. 

Consumer Decision Making Process

Present study is based on the recent purchase of the product on the basis of 5-step consumer decision making procedure. This assessment offers an opportunity to reflect understanding and capability to describe determinants of consumer behavior by evaluating the role of perception, motivation, and attitude of consumer behavior.

Consumer behavior is referred as mechanism used by customer for making purchasing decision and use and disposal of purchased goods or services. It also includes elements that create impact on decision of buy and product use. My chosen product for the present assignment is GUESS perfume (Guess Man 75ml Eau De Toilette Spray). At the initial time, this perfume has been used by me in my home country such as in India, and two weeks before I purchased same perfume from Chemist warehouse in Melbourne.

Figure 1: Consumer Decision Making Process
(Source: Stankevich, 2017)

Analysis of Requirement and Desire That Assisted To Purchase The Product

In the consumer decision making procedure, need stage initiates when a need is realized by the consumers. There are mainly two causes by which need occur such as internal stimuli and external stimuli. In this aspect, internal stimuli is generally emotional requirement like thirst, sadness, happiness, and others, while external stimuli such as advertisement, marketing, and others (Lamb et al., 2016). It can be said that, need takes place when imbalance is faced by customer between actual and desired states. In the present case, I need GUESS perfume because I am very much attached with its smell. Since, I shifted to Australia and therefore I miss my home country, but smell of this perfume connects me with my home nation. Therefore, it can be said that, it is the internal stimuli that assists need for GUESS perfume. Further, motivation is referred as procedure that assists individual to behave as they do. It takes place when a requirement is taken place that the customer wished to fulfill. My behavior of GUESS perfume is significantly pulled by expectancy theory as my expectation from this perfume is to gain positive incentives. Moreover, by application of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory, my need falls within the love and belongingness.

Figure 2 Maslow's need of hierarchy
(Source:Pinterest, 2016)

Analysis of Internal and External Sources of Information for Support Analysis

As soon as need is recognized by the consumer, they initiates to search for an answer. In this stage, an individual who recognize a need would then probably be persuaded to search for information, whether it may from internal sources or from external sources (Saleh, Alhosseini, and Slambolchi, 2017). In this aspect, internal search is referred to a memory of consumers, recollection of goods, or directed by personal experience. This takes place when an individual tries to search their memories to observe whether or not they recall earlier experience with a goods, services, or brand. Further, external research is performed when the consumer do not possesses any previous knowledge with respect to product that assisted them to look for information from personal sources, public sources or marketer dominated sources (Thomas et al., 2018). In the present case, I already used GUESS perfume that has been firstly gifted by my friend and I like this perfume as it smell is not very strong and I could not to take too strong perfumes. Although, I am already familiar with GUESS perfume, but I also want to research on this product, which is conducted by me from personal sources as well as public sources. In the context of personal sources, I obtained information from my friend who is very fond of perfumes, and as per her perspective GUESS perfume is one of the best as compared to any others. Further, I also observed some feedbacks from consumers at online shopping website that reflects about several qualities of perfumes.

Figure 3 Ratings and reviews of GUESS perfumes
(Source:GUESS Man Eau de Toilette - 75 ml (For Men), 2021)

Alternatives of the product

Table 1 Comparison of GUESS and GUCCI perfume

Analysis of the alternatives of product is considered as third stage of the consumer decision making procedure. In this stage, all alternatives are evaluated by the consumer as well as brand options on a range of features that have the capability to provide the advantage that the consumer is looking for (Stankevich, 2017). In specified phase consumer does compares the product with the characteristic which are expected in product chosen. The characteristic of perfume which enforced me to purchase it was its refreshing smell and reasonability of price. As I stated that after I moved to Australia, I started using other perfume i.e. Gucci y Gucci EDT for men which were comparatively strong from Guess Man perfume. Even though the fragrance was mesmerizing but it didn’t give the comfort or the way I feel while I use Guess Man perfume. Moreover, it was expensive in comparison to Guess Man perfume and didn’t provide satisfaction due to which I always think about some alternative.

Figure 4: Evoked Set for chosen product: Guess Man Perfume

Above Evoked set asserts the option chosen by me along with alternatives which I considered and which I ignored. As I cannot deal with strong fragrance for long period, thus when I found that Guess Man perfume is available I stopped using Guess Man perfume and switched back to same. Lastly, as I am emotionally attached with Guess Man perfume as I feel like being in home with its fragrance; thus I do prefer using it only. It is difficult to explain connection with the product as I have used same for long time and its fragrance is not too strong, due to which I does have to deal with other issues like allergy etc and can use it easily in the way I want. Thus, I would prefer using Guess Man perfume only.

Analysis of Purchase Methods for Purchasing Product

It is the fourth stage of consumer decision making process and in this stage purchase actually takes place. In this stage, an individual may form an intention to purchase the most preferred brand as evaluation of all alternatives has been done by them and they also ascertained the value that it would bring them (Wang, and Yu, 2017). It can be said that, making purchase decisions is the final decision in consumer decision making process. There are distinct considerations with respect to the manner in which customer purchase goods or services such as –

Use of individual income
Use of credit card
Home loans
Lease or rent agreement
Lay-by/Afterpay
Secured and unsecured personal loan

I used individual income for purchasing the GUESS perfume. In other way, it can be said that, I purchased perfume in cash from the Chemist warehouse.
Analysis of post-purchase behavior by identification of selected product features that decrease cognitive dissonance

In this phase of consumer decision making process, consumer demonstrates on their recent purchases. At this, consumer may face cognitive dissonance, which is meant as inner tension that is felt by consumer subsequent to recognition an inconsistency between behavior and opinion (Rybaczewska, Sparks, and Su?kowski, 2020). However, companies can decrease the cognitive dissonance through effective communication, providing guarantees, follow-up, and warranties. Since, it is the decision related to perfume only and therefore I am not facing any cognitive dissonance. The reason behind the same is that, GUESS is one of the leading and popular companies in all over world, which is known for its best quality of goods and services. Therefore, I am very much sure that this product would definitely as per my standards.

References

GUESS Man Eau de Toilette - 75 ml (For Men), 2021. (Online). Available through<https://www.flipkart.com/guess-man-eau-de-toilette-75-ml/p/itmf3wgvhwvhjerq>[Accessed on 10th December 2021]

Lamb WC, et all 2016, Consumer decision-making, MKTG3, Asia-Pacific Edition, Cengage Learning, pp 46 – 56.
Pinterest, 2016, Explore Maslow's Hierarchy, retrieved 23November 2016https://in.pinterest.com/pin/199354720981938641/

Rybaczewska, M, Sparks, L and Su?kowski, ? 2020,‘Consumers’ purchase decisions and employer image,’ Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, vol. 25, p.102123.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jretconser.2020.102123

Saleh, M, Alhosseini, S E and Slambolchi, A 2017,‘A Review of Consumer Decision-Making Styles: Existing Styles and Proposed Additional Styles’ InternationalJournal of Research in IT, Management and Engineering, vol. 7, no. 1, pp.33-44.http://indusedu.org/pdfs/IJRIME/IJRIME_1048_44055.pdf

Stankevich, A 2017,‘Explaining the consumer decision-making process: Critical literature review,’ Journal of International Business Research and Marketing, vol 2, no., 6, http://dx.doi.org/10.18775/jibrm.1849- 8558.2015.26.300

Thomas, V L, Magnotta, S ., Chang, H and Steffes, E, 2018,‘Role-playing in a consumption context: An experiential learning activity focused on the consumer decision-making process,’ Marketing Education Review, vol 28, no. 2, pp.89-97.https://doi.org/10.1080/10528008.2018.1431051

Wang, Y and Yu, C 2017,‘Social interaction-based consumer decision-making model in social commerce: The role of word of mouth and observational learning,’ International Journal of Information Management, vol. 37, no.3, pp.179-189.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2015.11.005

BUACC5931 Research and Statistical Methods for Business Assignment Sample

Topic : Associations between quantitative, qualitative job insecurity and well-being

Marking Criteria

Depending on the breath, in depth, relevance and correctness of the answer. Within four academic English sources, at least three peer reviewed, in correct APA. Well structured, with few or no errors in spelling and grammar.

SOLUTION

Job security is a sense of belief that a job is secure and the concerned person will keep it for long. Yet this is just a mere probability. It’s a sense of being informed that an individual’s job is secure. It builds a sense of protection against materialistic things and other responsibilities in life both economic as well as social. A person when steps into his professional life, desires a very basic requirement or is concerned about just one simple thing, i.e., a job for life. If things do not go as planned, job insecurity could become one of the major reasons for stress and anxiety. This is the reason why this topic has attracted researchers globally to research and write on such topics. Since the beginning of the 21st century, there have been major threats to job security. They are globalization, outsourcing of resources, downsizing of the firms, economic recession, and the involvement of advancement and new technologies in the work culture of the organizations worldwide. The new technologies lead to a reduction in manpower and an innumerable decrease in the cost of production for various organizations. 

Job insecurity is divided into two categories i.e., qualitative and quantitative job insecurity. Quantitative job insecurity deals with the situation where a person is concerned about the availability or existence of his current job in the future. Whereas qualitative job insecurity is the situation when employees are concerned about the unfavourable changes that take place while working in an organization that may impact their current position of responsibility (Witte et al., 2010). This mostly happens because of deterioration in the working conditions and a decrease in the structure of salary which results in a lack of career options.Both these categories of job insecurity led to outcomes that negatively impact the well-being of an individual.

Qualitative job insecurity is a situation where an individual is stuck between being employed or unemployed since the existence of his current job is highly threatened (Niesen et al., 2018). The employee lives in a dilemma wherein he is unsure of the uncertainty that is going to happen. This leaves a detrimental impact on the individual’s behaviour and attitude, which ultimately result in psychological distress and the urge to quit or reduce his/her commitment to work. The individual in order to compensate for the impact of stress then starts on to distance themselves from the organization (Niesen et al., 2018). The energy that should have been utilized in improving their performance is now diverted to regulating their emotions. Hence this outcome of qualitative job insecurity will lead negatively impact the individual’s ability to work on new ideas and develop creativity.

Moreover, qualitative job insecurity might not seem very concerning to all the individuals but this too leaves a great impact on the well-being of an individual. The threat of being at a constant level in a job with no advancement in the position of responsibility, being at a salary that isn’t increasing yearly instead starts to depreciate, might also be considered threatening to employees (Cuyper etal., 2010). The current way how organizations work is very unpredictable. The forms of qualitative job insecurity result in more or less the same outcome to the individual’s well-being as in quantitative insecurity. Qualitative job insecurities have been more prevalent these days, considering the aspects of liberalization, globalization, and privatization. The constant restructuring of economies around the world, and the transfer of powers affect the organizations as well which leads to the evolvement of uncertainties in the work-life of an individual (Cuyper et al., 2010).

Despite such great impacts on the well-being of an individual, qualitative job insecurity has always been an ignorant part. This form of job insecurity most commonly result in copying the responses of other individual working in the organisation instead of giving much attention to their mental health or desires themselves. They engage in coping with their own emotions and forget to search and work on ways to improve the performance of the organization.Both persistent types of job insecurity, the subject of quantitative insecurity, and esteemed elements of the job that are the subject of qualitative insecurity can be considered assets that an individual means to keep up with and secure. However, they address separate types of assets, which suggests that strain and precarity might include when they are compromised. Such circumstance requires considerably more work to adapt to and passes on less space to depend on other accessible assets to keep things in balance. For example, on account of qualitative work insecurity, one might in any case put resources into the fate of one's work, yet this is impractical if the two types of uncertainty are available. Hence, we need a superior comprehension of how the two parts of occupation instability might consolidate into an interesting individual encounter and what suggestions it bears for precarity and prosperity in the work-life balance.

Taking all these aspects into consideration, it can be stated that both these categories of job insecurity negatively impact the well-being of an individual and which lead to uncertain behaviour of the employees (Niesen et al., 2018). This ultimately is a loss for the organization as well. It can be stated that both these types of insecurities are unfavourable to the well-being of an individual in an equal manner. Yet, the quantitative job insecurity is a disaster as there is a possibility of losing the job itself which will lead to being in a state of unemployment. Nothing can be more disastrous for an individual than being in a state where they are unable to support their needs of themselves or in some cases their dependents as well.

The relationship between qualitative job insecurity, quantitative job insecurity, and well-being is fairly strong. Well-being can act as an order to control the sociodemographic effects of negativity and job characteristics within an individual (Griep et al., 2021). The sociodemographic of an individual also has a great impact on his well-being. It has been seen that they can cope with negativity more efficiently when a person has strong sociodemographic background i.e., a supportive family and stable socio-economic conditions.Whenaffected negatively, an individual starts negatively seeing every aspect and thus affects the wellbeing of both themselves as well as their dependents.

In the fierce universe of work, uncertainty in working conditions has turned into a significant stressor with indisputable proof of its extensive impending consequences well-being, and prosperity of the worker (Witte et al., 2010). A rising number of concentrates along these lines expect to comprehend the manners by which work frailty shows. In doing as such, it is important to represent the multi-faceted nature of the development as its various aspects might happen all the while and the commonness and possibly differential impacts of such designs remain understudied to a great extent.

Thus, it can be stated that cognitive appraisals in quantitative job insecurity hardly make any impact on the well-being association. Therefore, when an individual stresses his job insecurity, it becomes a hindrance to his career progression and gives birth to negative responses. In like manner, qualitative job insecurity also acts as a work stressor and has a great impact onthe psychological and behavioural attitudes of the individual. Mostly in the case of qualitative job insecurity individuals when losing their perks and benefits of jobs get affected more psychologically, than displaying a behavioural change. The psychological outcomes come with respect to job dissatisfaction or being exhausted emotionally.
 

References

Witte, H. D., Cuyper, N. D., Handaja, Y., Sverke, M., Naswall, K., &Hellgren, J. (2010, April). Associations Between Quantitative and Qualitative Job Insecurity and Well-Being: A Test in Belgian Banks. ResearchGate. Retrieved April 16, 2022, from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247887030_Associations_Between_Quantitative_and_Qualitative_Job_Insecurity_and_Well-Being_A_Test_in_Belgian_Banks

Cuyper, N. D., Witte, H. D., Kinnunen, U., &Natti, J. (2010, April). The Relationship Between Job Insecurity and Employability and Well-Being Among Finnish Temporary and Permanent Employees. ResearchGate. Retrieved April 16, 2022, from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247886954_The_Relationship_Between_Job_Insecurity_and_Employability_and_Well-Being_Among_Finnish_Temporary_and_Permanent_Employees

Niesen, W., Hootegem, A. V., Witte, H. D., Battistelli, A., &Handaja, Y. (2018, March 26). Scandinavian Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology. SJWOP. Retrieved April 16, 2022, from https://www.sjwop.com/articles/10.16993/sjwop.36/

Griep, Y., Lukic, A., &Kraak, J. (2021, March). The chicken or the egg: The reciprocal relationship between job insecurity and mental health complaints. ScienceDirect. Retrieved April 16, 2022, from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0148296320308742 

MBA600 Capstone Strategy Assignment Sample

Assignment Brief

Assessment Type: Individual reflective essay

Length: 2000 words (+/- 10% allowable range)

Weighting: 40%

Total Marks: 100

Submission: Online

Due Date: Week 13

Task

Individually, for essay writing help you are required to reflect on the learnings gained from undertaking the capstone subject and assessments by writing a 2000-word reflective essay.

Assessment Description

The purpose of this assessment is to foster students’ ability to coherently reflect on their undertaking of the Capstone: Strategy subject together with a reflection on their entire MBA.

Assessment Instructions

You are required to look back at their MBA course as a whole and identify the specific skills developed that will assist them in becoming effective practitioners in the workplace.

Learning is a persistent change in performance or potential that results from experience and interaction. Reflective learning is the process of stepping back from these experiences and reflecting on how skills, attitudes, mindset, and behaviors have evolved.

Your Reflective Essay Must Cover The Following:

• Introduction.

• A brief discussion on the value of reflective practice for managers and leaders

• A personal reflection on learnings from the capstone subject and consultancy research process.

• A personal reflection on skills developed over the MBA.

• A personal reflection on how these will assist in future career endeavors.

• Conclusions.

• Reference list.

The reflective essay should include a discussion of learnings from both a theoretical and practical perspective. Additionally, insights from undertaking assessments and research, capstone lessons as well as group activities from this and other subjects over the duration of the course. Specific examples should be cited to support and justify all points.

Assessment Information

COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA Copyright Regulations 1969

This material has been reproduced and communicated to you by or on behalf of Kaplan Business School pursuant to Part VB of the Copyright Act 1968 (‘Act’). The material in this communication may be subject to copyright under the Act. Any further reproduction or communication of this material by you may be the subject of copyright protection under the Act. Kaplan Business School is a part of Kaplan Inc., a leading global provider of educational services. Kaplan Business School Pty Ltd ABN 86 098 181 947 is a registered higher education provider CRICOS Provider Code 02426B.

Assessment Submission

This file must be submitted as a ‘Word’ document to avoid any technical issues that may occur from incorrect file format upload. Uploaded files with a virus will not be considered as a legitimate submission. MyKBS will notify you if there is an issue with the submitted file. In this case, you must contact your workshop facilitator via email and provide a brief description of the problem and a screenshot of the MyKBS error message. You are also encouraged to submit your work well before the deadline to avoid any possible delay involving the Turnitin similarity report or any other technical difficulties.

Late assignment submission penalties

Penalties will be imposed on late assignment submissions in accordance with Kaplan Business School “late assignment submission penalties” policy.

Solution

Introduction:

Reflective learning helps people to reflect on their own skills, attitudes, behaviour and mindset. In this reflective report, it discussed the value of reflective learning and reflective practice for leaders and managers. It also discussed the experience of own reflective learning from the capstone subject and consultancy research process. Here, I also identified the skills and knowledge developed throughout the session of my MBA course. This course has been designed to build essential academic, business and cultural skills. Through this reflective report, I clarified the way acquired skills and knowledge from the MBA Capstone course will help me and assist me in future career endeavours.

Value of The Reflective Learning Practice for Leaders and Managers:

Reflective Learning Practice is a lifelong process of acquiring new skills and knowledge to enhance professional and personal skills. It helps in keeping the mind engaged and train the mind of humans to handle a wide variety of challenges. It boosts the confidence level, helps people to be flexible and boosts the confidence level of people. The reflective practice allows leaders and managers to explore their own leadership capabilities. Reflective practice reduces gaps in knowledge and skills, reduces conflict and reduces the environment of a problematic blame culture. Reflective practices help leaders to learn and acquire new skills in a faster way and enhance the ability to be flexible in new situations. It helps leaders and managers to deal with uncertain and unfamiliar circumstances and figure out the solution for controlling the unfamiliar situation. It helps in enhancing the problem-solving skills ability by enhancing the critical thinking and strategic thinking power of leaders and managers. It enhances the skills and deep understanding regarding business strategy (Husam& Abraham, 2019, p.38). Reflective practice helps leaders and managers to reflect on the particular moment and situation and enhances the ability to understate their own actions, assumptions and feelings of others. It leverages the ability to fix problems and enhances knowledge regarding business insights. It helps leaders and managers to become role models for their team members. It helps in identifying the gaps in professional and personal knowledge and skills to strengthen their existing capability and skills and acquiring new skills and knowledge from new experiences. It accelerates the own effectiveness and development of a leader. It helps managers and leaders in developing their aptitudes of basic reasoning, intellectual adaptability, knowledge regarding vital dynamics for figuring out better solutions to critical issues and enhances the ability of undivided attention. It enhances the capability of leaders and managers to explore themselves and enhances the self-capacity level to push the entire team members in a more fit, prepared and positive direction. It enhances the human administrative capability and potential of leaders and managers.

Reflection on Learnings from the Capstone Subject and Consultancy Research Process:

The MBA 600 course of Capstone strategy subject and consultancy research process helped me to gain the appropriate knowledge regarding the business model. It enhances my deep understandings of the business strategy and enhances the new concept regarding the business insights. It helped me to gain knowledge regarding business strategy theories. It enhances the knowledge regarding people, culture and contemporary leadership capability that enhanced my key concepts regarding managing human resources effectively. It helped me to gain knowledge regarding ethical guidelines, governance and sustainability policy for continuing the business effectively. It helped me to know the role of the board in the assessment of business risks and business strategy. It helped me to acquire knowledge regarding the importance of financial and economic communication and interpretation in business. It helped me to learn the techniques to assess business performance, business liquidity and financial position of the business. It enhanced my knowledge regarding marketing psychology and strategies to achieve business goals and objectives (Newton?Calvert& Arthur, 2018, p.166). It helped me to improve my understanding level regarding consumer behaviour and the way consumer behaviour is directly connected to the strategies of business to increase the market share of the company. I realised the MBA 600 course of Capstone Strategy helped me to develop a dynamic corporate-level strategy for creating and enhancing business value through disruptive innovation. It helped me to gain knowledge regarding the importance of diversity, emotional intelligence level and cultural intelligence level. It helped me to understand the importance of appraising the people from different cultural backgrounds within the organisation (Fraustino et al., 2019, p.46). It helped me to gain knowledge regarding developing dynamic capabilities for improving corporate agility. I realised that it helped me assess the opportunities and needs of customers exist in the organisation. It helped me to gain knowledge regarding designing an appropriate and innovative business model and securing the accessibility of business capital and resources. It helped me to understand changing, streamlining and improving the practices of an organisation based on the organisation needs. I realised that the course helped me to understand the importance of using the appropriate business theories in the relevant and appropriate place. It helped me to understand the importance of assessing the impact of external macro-environmental factors and internal microenvironmental factors on business strategies. I realise the importance of effective utilisation of business resources to increase cash flow, market share and sales of the company. I learned the importance of the utilisation of superior infrastructure and innovative technology in the business to improve the efficiency and quality of the internal business process. The overall journey of the MBA Course made me more empowered and confident for the future workplace.

Personal Reflection on Skills That Developed Through the MBA Course:

The MBA 600 course of Capstone strategy subject and consultancy research process helped me to improve my change management skills. It helped me to learn the appropriate steps of leading the change within the organisation. I learned the importance of Kotter's 8 step change management model step by step. It increased my ability to convince others regarding the importance of change. It helped me to improve my guiding power to my team members to overcome the natural resistance to accept changes (Rodriguez et al., 2020, p.5). I also learned about other change management models like Elizabeth Kubler Ross change management model and ADKAR model to bring the changes at the individual level. The content and resources of the MBA 600 course helped me to improve my communication skill level and professional etiquette level to convince customers and attract them to utilise the services of the business. I learned about different professional etiquette to continue the positive and fruitful communication with senior business executives, colleagues and team members etc. (Lee et al., 2020, p.308). I realised that it is important to communicate with others to understand their emotional states and needs. The overall course helped me to improve my problem-solving skill. It helped me to figure out the appropriate resolutions for any critical issues by assessing the business performance through VRIO analysis. I learned about different problem-solving techniques to support my team members in an uncertain situations (Ottonicar et al., 2021, p.67). Moreover, it helped me to gain knowledge regarding product life cycle stages. It helped me to improve my capability of developing appropriate product strategies by introducing new models and features through continuous innovation as per customers’ needs and requirements. It improved my knowledge regarding the different levels of pricing strategy as per the demand, quality, economic status of the country and value of the company and product. It also improved my knowledge regarding appropriate promotional strategies to build brand awareness and emphasise the brand position in the respect of the product life cycle. The overall concept helped me to improve my business management and employee management skill. Moreover, I realised it improved my customer service skill. It also enhanced my emotional intelligence level and I learned the different techniques to control my own emotion and others as well. It helped to improve my self-esteem level and confidence skill to control any situation and manage the business activities efficiently.

Personal Reflection on the Way Acquired Skills and Knowledge will Assist me in Future Career Endeavours:

My long-term aim is to become a successful business project manager and the MBA 600 course of Capstone strategy helped me to strengthen my entrepreneurial skills to achieve my goal step by step. Communication skills will help me to professionally interact with my seniors, other shareholders and my colleagues appropriately. It will help me to improve my negotiating power to manage business activities as a successful project manager (Fergusson et al., 2019, p.290). Knowledge regarding change management skills will help me to understand the appropriate moment to bring changes within the organisation. It will help me to effectively convince my team members and support them to bring the changes to improve the competitive level of the company. It will help me to bring creativity and innovation to the business. Knowledge regarding problem-solving techniques will assist me to improve my active listening skill and critical thinking power (Slade et al., 2019, p.2). It will help me to figure out the appropriate resolutions for any critical situation to continue the business activities as a leader. Employee management skills will help me to improve my leadership capability as a business project manager in future. The business management techniques will help me to figure out appropriate pricing strategy, promotional strategy and product development and distribution strategy for being competitive in the market in future. Effective knowledge regarding customer service will help me to easily convince potential customers (Cirocki and Farrell, 2017, p.5). It will help me to influence customers to utilise the services offered by my future company. Self-esteem and confidence level and emotional intelligence skills will help me for being active and flexible in any critical and uncertain situation. My future endeavour is to utilise my skills in a positive way to make a huge contribution to the place of the business world.

Conclusion:

In view of the overall experience, the content and resources of the MBA 600 Course helped me to realise that it is important to acquire the appropriate professional and personal skills and knowledge for becoming a successful businessman in future. I realise that it is important to be flexible and confident in the business world to achieve the long-term aim of the person. The overall course helped me to prepare myself as a future manager to lead my team members and business activities appropriately. I realised I need to give focus on strengthening my existing skills. Moreover, I need to improve my new skills by continuous learning and gathering feedback from others for being competitive in future.

References:

Cirocki, A. and Farrell, T.S., 2017. Reflective practice for professional development of TESOL practitioners. The European Journal of Applied Linguistics and TEFL, 6(2), pp.5-23.http://www.reflectiveinquiry.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/RP-special.pdf

Fergusson, L., van der Laan, L. & Baker, S., 2019. Reflective practice and work-based research: a description of micro-and macro-reflective cycles. Reflective Practice, 20(2), pp.289-303.https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14623943.2019.1591945

Fraustino, J.D., Pressgrove, G. &Colistra, R., 2019. Extending understanding of service-learning projects: Implementing place-based branding for capstone courses. Communication Teacher, 33(1), pp.45-62.https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17404622.2017.1372609

Husam, H.A. & Abraham, P., 2019. Employability skills development through assessment in higher education: Students’ voices on reflective assessments. Glob Acad J Econ Buss, 1, pp.36-42.https://www.gajrc.com/media/articles/GAJEB_12_36-42.pdf

Lee, O.S., Lee, K.S. &Gu, H.J., 2020. Influence of Perception of Importance of Communication, Self-esteem and Communication skill on Patient Safety attitude of Nursing student. Journal of Digital Convergence, 18(10), pp.307-314.https://www.koreascience.or.kr/article/JAKO202031064817445.pdf

Newton?Calvert, Z. & Arthur, D.S., 2018. Capstone Courses and Projects. High?Impact Practices in Online Education: Research and Best Practices, pp.165-182.https://books.google.co.in/books?hl=en&lr=&id=wmd0DwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PT212&dq=benefits+of+capstone+courses+in+higher+education&ots=CG7ocgm5Ex&sig=kaTYa-M9dEhQk8AkWBExIPoYvqA&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=benefits%20of%20capstone%20courses%20in%20higher%20education&f=false

Ottonicar, S.L.C., Valentim, M.L.P. and Bouthillier, F., 2021. From Business Information Literacy to Decision-Making, Problem Solving and Innovation. International Journal of Media and Information Literacy, 6(1), pp.66-76.https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/from-business-information-literacy-to-decision-making-problem-solving-and-innovation

Rodriguez, J.A., Condom-Bosch, J.L., Ruiz, L. & Oliver, E., 2020. On the shoulders of giants: benefits of participating in a dialogic professional development program for in-service teachers. Frontiers in psychology, 11, p.5.https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00005/full

Slade, M.L., Burnham, T.J., Catalana, S.M. and Waters, T., 2019. The Impact of Reflective Practice on Teacher Candidates' Learning. International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 13(2), pp.1-8.https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1218300.pdf

PRJM6002 PRM530 Project Time Mgmt Assignment Sample

Assignment Brief

Due date: As set out in the Unit Outline, submission is via Turnitin (Blackboard).

Word Count: 1500 - 1800 words

ASSESSMENT INSTRUCTIONS

For assignment help Please read these assessment instructions carefully before attempting the assessment!
For this Assessment, you are to conduct your own research on the topic described (below) and review current literature and subsequently provide an essay on your research with cited references to Curtin University guidelines (Chicago referencing). Include a minimum of seven (7) references; some from scholarly journals, and from relevant texts that contribute to your essay. Articles need to be peer-reviewed.

You should support your arguments with evidence from your research. Use examples to illustrate your understanding of the issues and introduce your topic (inform the reader) and provide a conclusion to summarize your findings. 

Topic

When planning a project and estimating the expected duration of the component tasks, an important factor is the productivity of the labour assigned to a task.

For any labour intensive, ‘effort-driven’ project tasks for example:

• building a wall;
• interviewing clients for their requirements;
• developing a software module; or any other such activity, the degree to which the project manager accounts for labour productivity will influence the planned duration of the task.

Select a significant task from a project (social or workplace) with which you have some experience. You are required to describe and analyze the productivity of work on that task and to answer the Assessment, steps 1 to 4, as follows:

Step Task 1

Briefly describe your selected project and an appropriate, effort-driven task selected from that project. Explain the resources (human) that are required for the selected task. - 150 – 200 words 10 Marks

Step Task 2

Define productivity (in the context of project work) and define worker productivity and state how these can be measured. Explain how the productivity of your selected project task could be effectively measured. 200 – 250 words 20 Marks

Step Task 3

Describe three factors that may significantly affect the productivity of the workers for your selected project task and explain in what way and by how much these factors could influence the estimate of the work duration of that task. 650 – 750 words 35 Marks

Step Task Word Count Mark 4

Describe one management technique, appropriate to your nominated project and task, which addresses one or more of the factors described above (in Step 3); and which could be implemented on your chosen task to improve the worker productivity. Explain how you would expect the productivity of the work (and hence the task duration) to be impacted by this technique. 500 – 600 words 35 Marks

Instructions and Formatting Requirements:

• This is an individual Assessment that requires you to present your own work, apply critical thinking and in a format that follows the structure, mentioned elow.

• Your Assessment is to be submitted as single soft copy (MS Word file) via Turnitin on Blackboard. Ensure that you comply with the Guidelines for Submitting Soft Copy Assessments - available on Blackboard under Assessments.

• All Curtin policies apply to this work and you should particularly note those relating to plagiarism and late submission. Marks will be deducted for non-compliance with the Assessment instructions.

• Refer to the additional information on Essay Style writing (on Blackboard).
o The word count shall be declared clearly on the cover page by the student.
o The following parts will not be considered in the word count. All other parts (including tables) will be counted.

• Table of contents
• Introduction
• Conclusion
• References
• Appendices

o Submissions of 15% over the word limit will not be marked. The paper will be returned to the student to reduce the word count and resubmitted within 24 hours. Failing to comply with this requirement will result in the submission being disqualified.

o No text can be submitted as an image. Inserting text as images is not acceptable and could be viewed as an attempt to hide plagiarism. If you are experiencing issues with formatting in MS Word, please submit your MS Word file in TurnitIn.
• Page size: A4; Line spacing: 1.5
• Font size: 11; Font style: Calibri Margins: standard
• File format: Please provide your submission (paper) as an MS Word file (not PDF)

Submission
Submission through TurnitIn in Blackboard Late submissions will be penalized as per the Curtin Late Assessment Policy in the Unit Outline

Solution

1. Introduction

The application of the skills, expertise, instruments, and techniques to fulfil the requirements of the project is known as management of the project. It is distinct from the management which is an illustration of an ongoing process in one sense, that is, it has a time span and should be delivered within the given duration. Effort-driven tasks are those tasks in which people are assigned or removed which alters the length of the project based on utilized resources. Importantly, it does not alter the amount of work required for the task. The study aims to choose a task from a project and analyse the productivity of the labor. It includes the description of the selected project and a suitable effort-driven task. The study also includes an explanation of the productivity of the workers and factors that significantly affect their productivity.

2. Description of the Project

The project intends to build a thematic restaurant, which also includes architectural work on the restaurant wall. In the successful completion of a project, predetermined time frames, and standards play an important role. As mentioned by Irfan et al. (2021) that improper planning, over-budgeting, and delaying of the projects have been among the primary features behind the failure of construction projects worldwide. Therefore, this project includes a predetermined time frame of one year and standards for its successful completion. The role of the project manager in a project is crucial as it acts as the safety coordinator, decision-maker, controller of the process, coordinator of the quality, and team worker. Meng and Boyd (2017) stated that it also plays a crucial in increasing the satisfaction level of the clients.

In the case of an effort-driven task, the current value of the task remains the same irrespective of the number of resources utilized to it. When new resources are added to the task, total work gets distributed among them. In this project, the selected effort-driven task is to create a set of architectural drawings on the walls of the restaurant within the time frame of 64 weeks, which is the required time to complete the task by one architect. Since the task is effort-driven, thus 8 workers are assigned to it, and the task is scheduled to be finished in 8 weeks. Therefore, eight human resources are required for the selected task.

3. Productivity and its measurement

It is the belief of business fraternity, and governments that productivity is among the prime solutions to the improvement of living standards. But, in technical terms, productivity is the efficiency and effectiveness of the organizations, and the economy as a whole to transform the inputs into output. As influenced by Liao, Teo, and Low (2017), the relationship between resources utilized in the production process of a good, and its output is known as productivity. The productivity of an organization or economy increases when the growth in the output is greater than the amount of the input used in its production.

Productivity is not the reflector of the value of the output. It is only a measure of the amount of output produced from the utilization of the inputs. The relation between the resources utilized and the output is considered as the ratio of productivity (Priya and Aroulmoji 2020). The input in the process of the production could be the human resource or machines or both of them. However, output could be referred to as the unit or volume. As influenced by Priya and Aroulmoji (2020) productivity index is one when a worker completes a task in the given time frame. Thus the productivity of labor can be computed by dividing the total production with the inputs (Nakamura, Kaihatsu and Yagi 2018).

In the selected project task the productivity of the labor is measured by dividing the total set of architectural drawings by the number of the workers assigned to it. The amount of total architectural designs on the wall of the restaurant is 128.

Thus,
Productivity = Total amount of architectural drawings/No. of worker
= 128/8 = 16
The productivity of the workers assigned to the selected project task is 16.

4. Factors affecting the workers’ productivity

The productivity of the workers is among the major concerns of the project managers. Agrawal and Halder (2020) stated that many factors influence the productivity of the workers. It includes both internal and external factors. External factors affecting the productivity of the laborers are political unrest and environmental condition. Internal factors that have a significant impact on the productivity of the workers include individual worker's skills, workers' mindset, and dedication regarding work (Agrawal and Halder 2020). The lower level of productivity puts inflationary pressure on the budget of the project. Therefore, the project managers must recognize these factors that influence the productivity of the workers. The three factors that may significantly influence the productivity of the workers for the selected project task are:

? Engagement of the employee
? Environment of the workplace
? Technology

4.1 Engagement of the employees

The success of the project significantly depends upon the productivity level of the employees. Employee engagement is among those factors that influence the productivity of the workers. As mentioned by Barik and Kochar (2017) highly engaged employees lead to successful completion of the task and let the organization earn a significant level of profit. It is an approach at the workplaces that inspires the workers to stay dedicated to the goal of the project and perform at their best. Employee engagement is the extent to which workers are committed to their work and invest the efforts that are necessary for the completion of the project. An engaged employee is way more productive than their counterpart. In the effort-driven task of architectural drawings, the engagement of the employees would help in its successful completion. Osborne and Hammoud (2017) stated that US corporations cost USD 350 in a year. Therefore, it can be realized that employee engagement is an important factor that significantly impacts the productivity level of the workers.

In the selected project task, an employee works for 8 hours daily. If the employee engagement would be increased through successful management practice, the output of 8 hours of work could increase, and the task could be completed in eight weeks successfully.

4.2 Environment of the Workplace

Productivity is an important element of the projects, and it requires constant effort from the project managers to keep its level up to the requirement of the project. Environment of the workplace is the key aspect of the productivity of the workers. A negative environment at the workplace could lead to a lower productivity level of the employees. As stated by Massoudi and Hamdi (2017) that the environment of the workplace determines the motivation level, performance, and productivity of the workers. A better environment at the workplace is the most required element for improving the productivity of the workers. The productivity level of an employee is directly associated with the environment of the workplace. A positive environment motivates the employees and thus it assists in increasing the productivity level and successful completion of the project. Aldoseri and Almaamari (2020) stated that leadership has a crucial role in forming a friendly environment in the workplace that motivates and increases the employee satisfaction level. Therefore, a positive and friendly work environment would help in the completion of architectural drawings by increasing employees’ productivity.

4.3 Technology

The rapid changes in technological advancement have changed how businesses used to operate.Technological advancement in an organization could significantly increase the satisfaction level of employees as well as the customers (Van Zyl 2020). The growth in employees’ satisfaction level would lead to higher productivity which would ultimately increase the profit level of the organization. In project management, the use of technology at the workplace increases the productivity level of the employees and helps in its successful completion. The use of technology such as building information modelling (BIM) would assist in streamlining the architectural plans which would provide updates to every stakeholder of the project (Mesároš, Mandi?ák and Behúnová 2020). The use of technology- Virtual Reality (VR) - can help in visualizing the architecture and allow real-time changes in the designs. It increases the productivity of the workers as well because they get instant feedback for the work from stakeholders (Influenced by Shi 2019). Therefore, in this manner technology allows to increase the productivity of the workers and would assist in reducing the estimated duration of the architectural drawing task.

5. Description of the management technique

One of the primary techniques used by the leaders to increase the productivity of the employees is communication. Communication contributes significantly to the productivity of the team. Effective communication helps in mitigating the risk of failure of the project task. It is an important technique used by the project managers which assists the employees in understanding their job responsibilities (Influenced by Attaran, Attaran and Kirkland 2019). The use of information technology helps in effective communication, thus, effective communication helps the project managers in taking feedback and delivering information related to the project task.

Assessment of the employees is another technique used by the project managers. In this technique, project managers assess the strength and weaknesses of their employees. The assessment of the employees assists the managers in providing required training to the employees. The training program increases the overall productivity of the workplace and also increases the satisfaction level of the employees. Performance appraisal is a technique in the management process to evaluate the performance of the workers and recognize the skills of the employees (Islami, Mulolli and Mustafa 2018). Assessment of the skills of the employees helps the managers in assigning the job according to the employees' strengths. Teamwork is considered to be one of the most crucial aspects for the successful completion of the project. Khan and Mashikhi (2017) found that there is a significant impact of teamwork on the performance of the workers. Therefore, the project managers also utilize assessment techniques which creates an environment of teamwork. The technique of assessment and then letting the employees use their strengths helps in increasing workplace productivity. The strategy would help in the completion of architectural drawing tasks within the time frame.

The utilization of the project management software boosts the teamwork and productivity of the employees. In this technique, project managers employ the software which brings the entire stakeholders on a single platform. The stakeholders include team members, clients, and other officials of the organization. Proofhub is one of the software which assists the project managers in gathering all the stakeholders on a common platform and let productivity reach a new level (Chukwukelu and Ile 2019).

The project managers also use the technique of providing ownership to the employees. Provision of ownership to the employees means the managers provide liberty to employees for taking their own decisions (Influenced by Gubler, Larkin and Pierce 2019). It boosts the confidence level of the workers and thus their productivity. In this technique, project managers make the employee accountable for the job. This kind of method induces a sense of responsibility in the workers that let them work distinctively and impacts their performance. In the architectural drawings, this technique would help the employees to use their methods and bring the desired outcomes.

Project managers also provide incentives to the workers which induce them to perform effectively (Gosnell, List and Metcalfe 2020). It helps in motivating the employee to perform better, which ultimately increases the overall productivity level of the workforce. Therefore, incentives raise workers’ productivity and assist in the completion of the architectural drawing task before the assigned duration.

6. Conclusion

It can be concluded that from the above evaluation that discussed factors, and techniques of project management helps in increasing worker’s productivity. Therefore, the task of architectural drawing could be completed before the assigned duration of 8 weeks with the help of 16 workers.
 

7. References

Journals
Irfan, Muhammad, Sanam Zaib Khan, Nasruddin Hassan, Mazlan Hassan, Muhammad Habib, Salma Khan, and Hadi Hassan Khan. 2021. "Role of Project Planning and Project Manager Competencies on Public Sector Project Success." Sustainability 13, no. 3: 1421. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13031421

Meng, Xianhai, and Paul Boyd. 2017. "The role of the project manager in relationship management." International Journal of Project Management 35, no. 5: 717-728. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijproman.2017.03.001

Liao, Longhui, Evelyn Ai Lin Teo, and Sui Pheng Low. 2017. "A project management framework for enhanced productivity performance using building information modelling." Construction Economics and Building 17, no. 3: 1-26. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/AJCEB.v17i3.5389

Priya, Rajesh Shankar, and Vincent Aroulmoji. 2020. "A Review on Productivity and its Effect in Industrial Manufacturing." International Journal for Advanced Science and Engineering 6, no. 4: 1490-1499.

Nakamura, Koji, Sohei Kaihatsu, and Tomoyuki Yagi. 2018. “Productivity improvement and economic growth”. No. 18-E-10. Bank of Japan. https://doi.org/10.29294/IJASE.6.4.2020.1490-1499
Agrawal, Aman, and Srijeet Halder. 2020. "Identifying factors affecting construction labour productivity in India and measures to improve productivity." Asian Journal of Civil Engineering 21, no. 4: 569-579. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42107-019-00212-3

Barik, Smita, and Aastha Kochar. 2017. "Antecedents and consequences of employee engagement: A literature review." International Journal of Latest Technology in Engineering, Management & Applied Science 6, no. 4: 33-38. https://www.academia.edu/download/53002195/33-38.pdf
Osborne, Schrita, and Mohamad S. Hammoud. 2017. "Effective employee engagement in the workplace." International Journal of Applied Management and Technology 16, no. 1: 4. https://doi:10.5590/ijamt.2017.16.1.04

Massoudi, Aram Hanna, and Samir Salah Aldin Hamdi. 2017. "The Consequence of work environment on Employees Productivity." IOSR Journal of Business and Management 19, no. 01: 35-42. DOI: 10.9790/487X-1901033542

Aldoseri, Fatima Isa, and Qais Ahmed Almaamari. 2020. "Factors Influencing Employee Performance at the Banking Sector in the Kingdom of Bahrain: Literature Review." International Journal on Emerging Technologies 11(5): 304-309. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Qais-

Almaamari/publication/344242853_Factors_Influencing_Employee_Performance_at_the_Banking_Sector_in_Kingdom_of_Bahrain_Literature_Review/links/5f5fca7792851c0789676ff2/Factors-Influencing-Employee-Performance-at-the-Banking-Sector-in-Kingdom-of-Bahrain-Literature-Review.pdf

Van Zyl, Gerhardus. 2020. "The impact of new production technology on employee productivity in the SouthAfrican workplace." Journal of Economic and Financial Sciences 13, no. 1: 8. https://jefjournal.org.za/index.php/jef/article/view/507/974

Mesároš, Peter, Tomáš Mandi?ák, and Annamária Behúnová. 2020. "Use of BIM technology and impact on productivity in construction project management." Wireless Networks: 1-8. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-020-02302-6

Shi, Yangming, Jing Du, Changbum R. Ahn, and Eric Ragan. 2019. "Impact assessment of reinforced learning methods on construction workers' fall risk behavior using virtual reality." Automation in Construction 104: 197-214. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.autcon.2019.04.015

Khan, Sheeba, and L. S. Mashikhi. 2017. "Impact of teamwork on employees’ performance." International Journal of Education and Social Science 4, no. 11: 14-22. http://www.ijessnet.com/uploades/volumes/1598724863.pdf

Islami, Xhavit, Enis Mulolli, and Naim Mustafa. 2018. "Using Management by Objectives as a performance appraisal tool for employee satisfaction." Future Business Journal 4, no. 1: 94-108. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fbj.2018.01.001

Attaran, Mohsen, Sharmin Attaran, and Diane Kirkland. 2019. "The need for the digital workplace: increasing workforce productivity in the information age." International Journal of Enterprise Information Systems (IJEIS) 15, no. 1: 1-23. https://doi: 10.4018/IJEIS.2019010101

Chukwukelu, Ebere Patience, and C. N. Ile. 2019. "Office Competencies Required of Business Education Graduates for Effective Performance in Modern Offices in Imo State." Nau Journal of Technology and Vocational Education 3, no. 1: 54-64. http://www.naujtved.com.ng/index.php/jtved/article/view/61

Gubler, Timothy, Ian Larkin, and Lamar Pierce. 2018. "Doing well by making well: The impact of corporate wellness programs on employee productivity." Management Science 64, no. 11: 4967-4987. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2883

Gosnell, Greer K., John A. List, and Robert D. Metcalfe. 2020. "The impact of management practices on employee productivity: A field experiment with airline captains." Journal of Political Economy 128, no. 4: 1195-1233. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w25620/w25620.pdf

PRJM6010 Project and People Assessment 2 Sample

Assignment Brief

Value: 40%

For this assessment you will be required to write an academic essay discussing one of the topics provided below in the light of theories and concepts discussed in the unit and their application to the project management context.

Please read the assessment instructions below carefully before attempting the essay!

Assessment Instructions for assignment help

• Please complete the essay in a Word document and upload to Blackboard via Turnitin.
• Submit Assessment 2 - week 6 (11:59pm THURSDAY 1st April)
• Word Count – 1500 words (10% leeway)
• At the top of the first page, you must have your first and last name, your student number, your email address, and the title of your essay.
• Include in-text references in your critical essay and a correctly formatted Reference List on.
• Ensure that your work contains minimal (read negligible) grammar, syntax or spelling mistakes!

Essay Requirements

You are required to write an academic essay discussing and critically evaluating one of the following topics:

• Decision making in project management
• Antecedents and outcomes of stakeholder satisfaction in projects
• Role of emotions in project management

You are required to find minimum 6 scholarly references from peer-reviewed academic journals that address your selected essay topic. References from other sources such as textbooks, reputable magazines (e.g., The Economist, Harvard Business Review) can be used as long as you have 6 (six) scholarly references. Websites are not acceptable as a reference, unless it is an online version of a reputable publication (e.g., Forbes magazine). Wikipedia is not acceptable as it has very little credibility since anyone can go in and change a Wikipedia page. 

In your essay you will need to cover two main components:

1) summaries the key themes from the academic journals on your chosen topic; and

2) discuss how this topic is relevant for project managers based on your research of the academic articles. An essential component of the essay is to demonstrate critical thinking. All information supplied in the essay should be evidence-based (i.e., sourced from scholarly references) and not based on personal opinion.

Your essay must be based on a central argument or hypothesis that is clearly outlined in the introduction. An essay is not a report, where you briefly summarize what is known about a particular topic. Rather an essay is a critical evaluation of a particular argument or a hypothesis.
A suggested structure for your essay is Introduction, Main Body, and Conclusion (including limitations). Please provide a reference list (formatted according to Chicago style) at the end of your essay.
Note: the reference list is not included in the word count!

Solution

Decision Making in Project Management

Introduction

Among all the skills that project managers need to have for managing different projects, decision making is the most essential and valuable skill. According to Erdogan, Šaparauskas, and Turskis (2017, 272), proper decision making in project management is very important as it influences the success of projects to large extent. In a study, Samset and Volden (2016, 299) commented that the first phase of decision making in project management support project governance. In project governance the decisions taken by the project manager define the actions, verify performance and grant power. Hence, proper decision making is very essential. The essay aims to discuss how decision making is relevant to project managers and their significance in project management. The essay argues that decision making in project management is essential as it helps a project manager to maintain progress and compare the options available for taking the best course of action. For this purpose, the paper analyses the effectiveness of decision making in project management, its importance to project managers, and the different decision-making style that projects managers consider.

Main Body

Making an effective decision and applying them to work is the hallmark of high-quality performance within any organisation. In project management, every success, every opportunity held or missed, every mishap that happens is the result of the decision made by the project manager. Marques, Gourc, and Lauras (2011, 1058) discussed the factors on which the decision making of a project manager depends. The study identified that in project management, the decision needs to be made by evaluating the objective of the project and the current situation. On the other hand, the project manager also needs to evaluate the past present and future events that are going to happen as the consequences of the decision taken. Consideration of the above factors is essential for effective decision making. Further, Alias et al. (2016, 62) discussed the critical success factors in project management practice where they emphasised decision making as an essential CSF for the success of a project. The study state that the decisions that are taken at the initial phases of project design put a larger impact on the success of big projects than compared to the decision taken in the later phases. On the contrary, Verner, Sampson, and Cerpa (2008, 78) surveyed 24 projects and found that 88% of the projects failed due to inappropriate decision made at the later phase when it was the time to deliver the project. Thus, it can be said that effective decision making is vital not only at the earlier phase of a project process but throughout the project duration.

Good decision making involves the consideration of several other factors that can lead to the success of the projects. Too and Weaver (2014, 1392-1397) conducted a study to analyse the different features of a good decision-making process in project governance. The study showed that while decision making, the project manager must be focused on the objectives of the project and analyse the relevant data and information required for achieving the objectives. Organisational and project constraints are essential factors that need to be considered while decision making. This would make the decision realistic for the project situation. Moreover, Heagney (2016) stated that the risks that are associated with the decisions should be identified and a proper risk-mitigating approach should be implemented. The project manager must also follow a reasonable process that is fair and constant for achieving the desired result. While making decisions, the project manager should keep in mind that he has to respect the ideas and opinion of the team members while making the final decision. Bouwmans et al. (2017, 73) in their study found that a major reason for team conflict in project management happens because the project leader or manager do not consider or value the opinion of the teammates for making decisions for the project. Hence, participative decision making is also an essential component of the decision making process in project governance.

Decision making capability of a project manager put a considerable impact on the deliberate value of the benefit delivered. The decisions are mostly based on the information feed collected by the project manager. In research work, Eweje, Turner, and Müller (2012, 641) analysed the impact of information feed utilised by decisions makers in project management. The study showed that there is a positive correlation between decision-making practice and business performance. Ureña et al. (2015, 14) have found that the main challenge in project management is unreliable, inadequate or misleading information served to project managers, due to which there arose a conflict between the planning, policy and decision making. Hence, the project manager must consider an alternative approach to get complete information for decision making. The authors have suggested an approach to get complete information for effective decision making in project management. In the initial stage, projects managers have to discard the information that is incomplete in nature and process only those pieces of information that are complete, which means the information provides a complete set of data. In the second phase of the approach, project managers should penalise the experts who have provided incomplete information. This practice will discourage the supply of misleading information for future projects. If the missing data are essential for decision making, project managers should try to collect the data and complete the values for decision making (Ureña et al. 2015, 16). Thus, it can be seen that the decision made by project managers must be based on a complete information feed and discourage any misleading information supply.

Project managers are responsible for coping up with the decision-making activities like identifying, selecting, classifying and ranking. Each activity is associated with a certain risk if the desired outcome is not attained. In this regard, Ebrahimnejad et al. (2014, 950) identified a few decision-making tools that can assists managers to mitigate the risk. The first tool identified is Multi-Attribute Decision Making also known as MADM. This tool allows the project management team to access an effective framework for evaluating multiple and conflicting criteria (Liu, et al. 2019, 880-885). An important type of MADM is compromising programming which is widely used for real-life decision making. As several methods are having different constraints and characteristics, it is impossible to use them for making decision s in project management (Ebrahimnejad, Mousavi, and Seyrafianpour 2010, 576-577). Therefore, the researcher considers innovating an effective tool has would base on the fuzzy theory. The fuzzy MADM technique is used in decision making when the project manager faces several options and indicators for making an effective decision for the project’s success. Under the fuzzy theory, the decision-maker can use his knowledge, judgement and experience for deciding project management (Farsijani, Nikabadi, and Amirimoghadam 2015, 90). However, Abdel-malak et al. (2017, 329) criticized the fuzzy MADM approach as it is difficult to handle by some project managers as it involves assessment of numeric and logical values. Nevertheless, the effectiveness of this approach cannot be denied for decision making in project management.

There has been much debate over decades regarding the base of decision making in project management. As researchers have highlighted many facts, the decision-making process has become easier as project managers use peer theories for making decisions for projects’ success. The project managers are responsible to have a process that enables the whole team to decide rationally on the different facets of the project. They must consider the facts, values, means and ends that will help to make an appropriate decision throughout the project process. The decision models that consider the above-mentioned facets are Maslow’s pyramid and the Pareto principle. B. Soni and R. Soni (2016, 259) suggest that a project manager should understand the different need of the resources that are associated with the project. The decision based on the need’s hierarchy is generally accepted by all the team members. This makes the project successful as all the participants contribute with the full potential obeying the decision of the project manager. Besides, Ivan?i? (2014, 633-639) suggested that by using the Pareto principle, the project manager can prioritise the challenges and find effective solutions for resolving such. The project manager can use the 80/20 measurement scale for finding out the accurate issue that might hamper the project. Hence, it has been proven to be an effective theory that can be considered while decision making in project management.

Conclusion

The essay argues that decision making in project management is essential as it helps a project manager to maintain progress and compare the options available for taking the best course of action. For the analysis, it can be concluded that there are essential factors that are needed to be considered while deciding on projects’ success. The essentiality of complete information has been highlighted in this essay as it is the realm of good project governance. For obtaining important information and data, the best approach that project managers can consider is fuzzy Multi-Attribute Decision Making. Besides, consideration of important theory such as Maslow’s need hierarchy theory and Pareto’s principle should also be considered for effective decision making.

References

Abdel-malak, Fam F., Usama H. Issa, Yehia H. Miky, and Emad A. Osman. 2017. "Applying decision-making techniques to Civil Engineering Projects." Beni-Suef University journal of basic and applied sciences 6, no. 4 (December): 326-331.

Alias, Zarina, E. M. A. Zawawi, Khalid Yusof, and N. M. Aris. 2016 "Determining critical success factors of project management practice: A conceptual framework." Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences 153 (October): 61-69.

Bouwmans, Machiel, Piety Runhaar, Renate Wesselink, and Martin Mulder. 2017. "Fostering teachers' team learning: An interplay between transformational leadership and participative decision-making?" Teaching and Teacher Education 65 (July): 71-80.

Ebrahimnejad, Sadoullah, S. Meysam Mousavi, Reza Tavakkoli-Moghaddam, and Mojtaba Heydar. 2014. "Risk ranking in mega projects by fuzzy compromise approach: A comparative analysis." Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems 26, no. 2 (January): 949-959.

Ebrahimnejad, Sadoullah, Seyed Meysam Mousavi, and Hamed Seyrafianpour. 2010. "Risk identification and assessment for build–operate–transfer projects: A fuzzy multi attribute decision making model." Expert systems with Applications 37, no. 1 (January): 575-586.

Erdogan, Seyit Ali, Jonas Šaparauskas, and Zenonas Turskis. 2017. "Decision making in construction management: AHP and expert choice approach." Procedia engineering 172 (January): 270-276. doi: 10.1016/j.proeng.2017.02.111

Eweje, John, Rodney Turner, and Ralf Müller. 2012. "Maximizing strategic value from megaprojects: The influence of information-feed on decision-making by the project manager." International Journal of Project Management 30, no. 6 (August): 639-651.

Farsijani, H., M. Nikabadi, and H. Amirimoghadam. 2015. "Six sigma project selections using fuzzy network-analysis and fuzzy MADM." Decision Science Letters 4, no. 1: 87-96.

Heagney, Joseph. 2016. Fundamentals of project management. New York, USA: Amacom.
Ivan?i?, Valentina. 2014. "Improving the decision making process trought the Pareto principle application." Ekonomska misao i praksa 2 (December): 633-656.

Liu, Yating, Hengjie Zhang, Yuzhu Wu, and Yucheng Dong. 2019. "Ranking range based approach to MADM under incomplete context and its application in venture investment evaluation." Technological and Economic Development of Economy 25, no. 5 (July): 877-899.

Marques, Guillaume, Didier Gourc, and Matthieu Lauras. 2011. "Multi-criteria performance analysis for decision making in project management." International Journal of Project Management 29, no. 8 (December): 1057-1069.

Samset, Knut, and Gro Holst Volden. 2016. "Front-end definition of projects: Ten paradoxes and some reflections regarding project management and project governance." International journal of project management 34, no. 2 (February): 297-313.

Soni, Bina, and Ramesh Soni. 2016. "Enhancing Maslow's hierarchy of needs for effective leadership." In Competition Forum 14, no. 2 (July): 259.

Too, Eric G., and Patrick Weaver. 2014 "The management of project management: A conceptual framework for project governance." International Journal of Project Management 32, no. 8 (November): 1382-1394.

Ureña, Raquel, Francisco Chiclana, Juan Antonio Morente-Molinera, and Enrique Herrera-Viedma. 2015. "Managing incomplete preference relations in decision making: a review and future trends." Information Sciences 302 (May): 14-32.

Verner, June, Jennifer Sampson, and Narciso Cerpa. 2008. "What factors lead to software project failure?." In 2008 Second International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Science, pp. 71-80. IEEE.

TSM11105 International Tourism Assignment Sample

50% of module assessment

Due to be submitted by 1pm on Friday 11th March on Moodle using Turnitin.

Target length: 2500 words (not including reference list). The Maximum length: 3000 words.

• Topic: Write an essay of 2500 words that addresses the following question for essay writing help.

Given the pressures of the global environmental crisis, is the growth of tourism still an appropriate development strategy

Essay Requirement

• Your essay should be based on secondary research and be supplemented with figures (visitor numbers and/ or statistics) and any contextual information you feel your research can contribute.

• Your essay should be fully referenced using the APA 7 style of referencing and follow an essay format, which means to be written in a continuous prose without headings and subheadings, tables and figures.

• References do not count towards your word limit, and they should be listed at the end of your report in alphabetical order.

• Essays that are submitted late without being granted an extension will be penalised (capped at P1%) if they are submitted within a week of the submission date. If submitted any later than that, your assignment will be marked at F5.

• Please contact Constantia Anastasiadou prior to the due date if you have valid reasons to request an extension – extensions after the due date will not be granted

Solution

Introduction

Amidst the present uncertainty, tourism is expected to grow by 4 percent in 2023, further solidifying its position as a significant and resilient economic sector. For communities across the globe to get the most possible benefits from tourism, it must be handled with caution in order to maximise the advantages that tourism can give (Chang et al., 2020). In this file I will determine if the development of tourism is still a sustainable growth strategy in light of the current global environmental crisis and strain. Tourism has had a recent surge in popularity around the globe, and this research will investigate the reasons behind this increase. Similar to this, the research will examine how a successful tourist development strategy may help the whole globe in a similar way. I will use a variety of data sources, including national and international statistics, as well as news reports, to create a detailed analysis that includes all of the most important facts and numbers in their comprehensive essay.

International tourism has climbed for eight consecutive years, according to the most recent United Nations World Tourism Organization World Tourism Barometer data, marking a historic milestone. In 2019 the number of persons entering from other countries increased across the board. While the high growth rates of 2017 and 2018 may be linked to factors such as Brexit uncertainty, the collapse of Thomas Cook, geopolitical and social tensions, and the global economic slump, the outlook for 2019 is expected to be more moderate. Europe, Asia, and the Pacific were hit the hardest by the economic slump, with Europe and Asia and the Pacific bearing a disproportionate amount of the burden (Hall, 2019).According to the UNWTO Confidence Index, the global economy is expected to increase between 3% and 4% in 2020, which is a cautious optimism. While 43% forecasted a decrease, 47% forecasted an increase for 2019. According to forecasts, both the Tokyo Olympics and the World Expo 2020 in Dubai are projected to have a significant influence on the tourism industry. According to UNWTO Secretary-General ZurabPololikashvili, tourism is a strong economic sector in these times of turbulence and uncertainty (Higgins-Desbiolles, 2018).The industry continues to outperform the world economy and calls upon us to not only expand but to grow better, despite recent lowered global economic views, international trade tensions, social upheaval, and geopolitical unpredictability.

The United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) emphasises the need of sustainable growth in light of tourism's position as a key exporter and job creator. As the Decade of Action gets underway, tourists have a key role to play in global development policy, and they have the opportunity to make a substantial impact as the 2030 Agenda and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals are completed in under 10 years(Higgins-Desbiolles, 2020).The Middle East surpassed the rest of the globe in terms of growth in international visitor arrivals, becoming the fastest-growing region on the global tourism map. Because of slower development in Asia and the Pacific, international arrivals grew by 5 percent, although they remained above typical.743 million international tourists descended on Europe last year, despite the region's slower-than-average growth rate of 4 percent (+4 percent), which was lower than the global average. (This represents 51% of the worldwide market). In the aftermath of Hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017, several Caribbean islands continued to recover, however South American immigration decreased as a consequence of the country's ongoing social and political upheaval (+2 percent). The cultural and heritage tourism in these areas have reduced drastically. According to the little statistics available, arrivals in North Africa increased by 9 percent in 2019, but arrivals in Sub-Saharan Africa increased by just 1.5 percent in 2019(Kapera, 2018).

According to Dependency Theory, modernization in developing nations has failed due to the capitalist system's uneven trade ties between developed and developing countries. Unbalanced trade relations arise when the global economic system favours affluent industrialised nations owing to their abilities to control and manage the global economy via capital accumulation, foreign investment control, and political influence. Dependency structures exist between the world's "core" of original capitalist nations and the world's "periphery" of newly independent developing countries. The global economic downturn has had little effect on visitor spending, particularly among the top ten spenders. France (+11 percent) and the United States (+6 percent), which are among the world's top ten outbound markets, had the highest percentage gains in foreign visitor spending.In Brazil and Saudi Arabia, two of the world's fastest-growing economies, tourists spent less money than in previous years. It can be noticed that outbound travel from China, the world's biggest source market, surged by 14 percent in the first six months of 2019, despite a 4 percent fall in expenditure.Since 1998, according to Pololikashvili, the number of destinations producing more than $1 billion in international tourist has almost doubled in number(Martínez et al., 2019). The responsibility of ensuring that all of the benefits are spread equally and that no one is left behind is one of the most important things that onehave to do. The United Nations World Tourism Organization has selected 2020 as the International Year of Tourism and Rural Growth, and one may anticipate that the business will play a vital role in stimulating economic development in rural areas, creating jobs, and preserving cultural heritage.

Tourism has a significant detrimental influence on the environment. They include issues with local natural resource depletion, pollution, and waste. In regions where resources are already limited, over-consumption of natural resources may have a negative impact on tourism. Tourism may result in soil erosion, increased pollution, the disappearance of natural habitats, and an increase in the number of endangered species being placed under threat. These consequences may have a long-term negative impact on the natural resources that tourism relies on. The tourism industry is presenting the promotion to demonstrate how robust and long-lasting it is. On the eve of the United Nations General Assembly in 2020, a worldwide debate will take place on the role of global collaboration in guaranteeing a better future for everyone, with tourism at the forefront of the discussion(Pan et al., 2018). Tourism is discouraged since it has a negative impact on the surrounding ecosystem. Just a few of the concerns include environmental effect, depletion of local resources, and waste generation. In tourist locations, overconsumption of natural resources is a prevalent concern, particularly in areas where resources are already scarce.

Natural ecosystems may be destroyed as a result of soil erosion and pollution caused by visitors, and endangered species may be placed under additional stress as a result of their presence. In the long term, these results may have a detrimental influence on the natural resources that are essential to the development of tourism. When it comes to water use, a typical tropical country golf course consumes the equivalent of 60,000 rural dwellings. Every year, around 1500 kg of chemical fertilisers, insecticides, and herbicides are applied to the crops in order to increase yields(Rasoolimanesh et al., 2020). Transportation accounts for 90 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions, which is more than 5 percent of total global emissions. According to current projections, tourists will contribute to a 25 percent increase in CO2 emissions in 2030 relative to 2016. From 1,597 million to 1,998 million metric tonnes, there was a growth of 1.998 percent overall in production volume.

Modernization theory, which emerged in the 1950s and early 1960s, stated that development could only occur in developing countries as they became more industrialised and integrated with the more prosperous developed economies, and that development would occur in less developed countries to the extent that they imitated the developed countries' economic and cultural systems.This development is often hampered by global crisis.However, regardless of the global environmental crisis, the development of tourism and the tourist industry as a whole is vital for the future of the world economy. Travel's appeal and the growth of the tourism sector are influenced by a variety of variables. Here are some of the most important. Additionally, it's important to note that, when talking about tourism and the expansion of the tourism business, Sector 1 is only concerned with long-term expansion. It is vital at this point to have a grasp of what defines a sustainable development model in the tourism sector.Tourists, companies, and communities all get the benefits of sustainable tourism, which does not jeopardise the ability of future generations to meet their own needs in the process(Sheller, 2021). It maintains the created and experienced cultural past, as well as the traditional values of the host communities, while also preserving their socio-cultural authenticity and encouraging tolerance among people of diverse cultural backgrounds and backgrounds(Streimikiene et al., 2021). Among other things, it ensures the equitable distribution of socioeconomic advantages, such as stable employment and income-earning opportunities as well as social services, among all stakeholders and contributes to the reduction of poverty in host communities in order to ensure long-term economic viability.

Tourists of today and future, as well as the local communities that welcome them, benefit from sustainable tourism development, which both protects and generates new possibilities for them. If put into practise, it has the potential to result in resource management that satisfies economic, social, and aesthetic objectives while also maintaining cultural integrity, critical ecological processes, biological variety, and life-supporting ecosystems, among other things. This seems to be a great approach to take(Streimikiene et al., 2021). People are becoming increasingly aware that, while tourism is generally welcomed for the benefits it provides, the industry's environmental impact must also be considered, and efforts must be made to further strengthen the positive correlation between the environment's impact on tourism and the industry's ability to alleviate poverty. 'Sustainable Tourism' refers to tourism that is beneficial to the local economy while also causing no damage to the environment or social fabric of the places it visits. It is becoming more popular.

The majority of government officials all over the world have expressed support for tourism, and prior to the turn of the twentieth century, there were few efficient regulatory systems in place to take environmental concerns into consideration when considering the profitability of a commercial venture. They will only make significant changes to their business practises if they are compelled to do so by external circumstances that cannot be ignored or in order to gain a competitive advantage. This is true regardless of whether they are responding to exhortations or having the best of intentions (Sheller, 2021). It was the possibility of making large sums of money quickly by exploiting natural resources that were traditionally regarded to be freely available that drew the attention of government and corporate leaders, as well as a considerable number of local residents and businesses.

Sustainability in tourism is based on a set of norms and ideas that serve as a guide for those who practise it. A measure of the quantity of things that oneacquires and the amount of stuff that one may discard will help to limit waste and overconsumption in order to prevent the long-term implications of environmental devastation. However, this will be difficult. The preservation and promotion of diversity at the levels of the environment, society, and culture are needed in order to ensure long-term sustainable tourist development(Sheller, 2021). The long-term viability of tourism may be enhanced by the inclusion of strategic planning frameworks and environmental effect assessments in national and local strategic planning frameworks and environmental impact assessments. In order to keep their businesses viable while simultaneously safeguarding the environment, local economies depend on tourists for support, and this kind of tourism benefits both the environment and these businesses. By enabling visitors to engage in and learn about their surroundings, community participation not only benefits the locals of the region, but it also enhances the pleasure of tourists' holidays. Working together and avoiding any conflicts of interest requires continual contact between the tourism industry and local communities, organisations, and institutions, which must be maintained at all times. When employees are educated in sustainable tourism practises and employed at all levels of an organisation, the overall quality of the visitor experience is improved.

In reality, when animal interactions are carried out in a responsible way, this is precisely what occurs. The establishment of local economies based on attracting tourists to see and enjoy wildlife in its natural context reduces the likelihood of individuals being involved in wildlife poaching. In fact, ecotourism has a positive impact that extends beyond the tourist business, as it is becoming widely recognised that the preservation of native species is both financially and ethically beneficial to the industry (Rasoolimanesh et al., 2020). Sustainable tourism initiatives, such as conservation efforts for vulnerable or endangered species, are used to urge local people to maintain their environments and the wildlife that lives within them. In contrast to this, sustainable tourism generates income for the people who live in the area while also contributing to the preservation of the environment in question. However, sustainable tourism encompasses much more than simply viewing "landscapes." There are many other benefits to sustainable tourism as well. In addition to having a good influence on marine life and aquatic habitats, sustainable tourism has the potential to do so.

Poaching and habitat degradation may be avoided by sustainable tourism, and pollution can be minimised as a result of sustainable tourism. Because tourism generates more revenue, it is easier to accomplish collective cooperation to reduce pollution on an individual level. When compared to "poor tourism," sustainable tourism promotes the sharing of experiences, the learning from one another, and the enjoyment of one's surroundings among visitors and residents alike.Cash crops and insecure work are the result of mass manufacturing and unthinking mass transportation. Occasionally, a region's economic well-being depends on a single crop or a single enterprise, and it is only a matter of time until those circumstances shift."Sustainable tourism" encompasses a wide range of methods to accommodation, eating, farming, and cultural preservation, all of which are integral to the concept (Rasoolimanesh et al., 2020). When communities have boutique hotels, culinary schools, agrotourism, and tours that are incorporated into the tourism economy, they are less exposed to external events and the downsides of cash crop economies. Historically, rituals have served to bring people from various regions and continents together. They've been around for centuries, even at a time when most of us had substantially less, and as a result, they're almost unbreakable. Many old practises, on the other hand, are in danger of being lost as a consequence of globalisation.

Responsible tourism, regardless of the form of local culture and tradition that is being promoted, whether it is gin distilleries, handmade carpets, or any other sort of items, adds to the bringing together of merchants and consumers(Pan et al., 2018). The act of travelling is one of the most gratifying and fun things one may partake in throughout our lives when it comes to leisure pursuits. On their deathbeds, the great majority of people do not express a wish for more work time or for more costly clothing, according to research. Their top priorities include more time with family and friends, as well as more opportunity to travel and explore new places.

Conclusion

I would like to conclude that only in terms of the whole human needs, values, and standards of a decent life and a good society as understood by the societies experiencing change can development be accurately measured. UNDP created a Human Development Index (HDI) that considers development to have three aspects. Longevity and health, access to knowledge, and a decent standard of living.This aspect is supported by the concept of sustainable tourism.Sustainable tourism is beneficial to both the environment and the people that visit it. It is a win-win situation for everyone. Their usage is advantageous in terms of both economics and ecology, and their use is recommended in both cases. On our world, there are just a few natural landscapes or wilderness areas to explore. Every natural environment has been influenced by human activities in one way or another throughout the course of human history. Tourism is the only company or activity that has the ability to significantly modify the landscape. Woods, mountains, and regions famed for their rivers and lakes are among the natural sceneries that may be found in this area. The natural environment serves as the foundation for the tourist industry. Sustainability Tourism must be supported by both the government and non-governmental organisations in order to make significant improvements to the environment, regardless of the difficulties the environment is now facing.

References

Chang, C. L., McAleer, M., & Ramos, V. (2020). A charter for sustainable tourism after COVID-19. Sustainability, 12(9), 3671 https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/9/3671

Hall, C. M. (2019). Constructing sustainable tourism development: The 2030 agenda and the managerial ecology of sustainable tourism. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 27(7), 1044-1060. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09669582.2018.1560456

Higgins-Desbiolles, F. (2018). Sustainable tourism: Sustaining tourism or something more?. Tourism management perspectives, 25, 157-160. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09669582.2020.1791141

Higgins-Desbiolles, F. (2020). The “war over tourism”: Challenges to sustainable tourism in the tourism academy after COVID-19. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 29(4), 551-569. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09669582.2020.1803334

Kapera, I. (2018). Sustainable tourism development efforts by local governments in Poland. Sustainable cities and society, 40, 581-588. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2210670717314725

Martínez, J. M. G., Martín, J. M. M., Fernández, J. A. S., &Mogorrón-Guerrero, H. (2019). An analysis of the stability of rural tourism as a desired condition for sustainable tourism. Journal of Business Research, 100, 165-174. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S014829631930205X

Pan, S. Y., Gao, M., Kim, H., Shah, K. J., Pei, S. L., & Chiang, P. C. (2018). Advances and challenges in sustainable tourism toward a green economy. Science of the Total Environment, 635, 452-469. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S004896971831194X

Rasoolimanesh, S. M., Ramakrishna, S., Hall, C. M., Esfandiar, K., &Seyfi, S. (2020). A systematic scoping review of sustainable tourism indicators in relation to the sustainable development goals. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 1-21. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09669582.2020.1775621

Sheller, M. (2021). Reconstructing tourism in the Caribbean: connecting pandemic recovery, climate resilience and sustainable tourism through mobility justice. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 29(9), 1436-1449. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211973617301319

Streimikiene, D., Svagzdiene, B., Jasinskas, E., &Simanavicius, A. (2021). Sustainable tourism development and competitiveness: The systematic literature review. Sustainable development, 29(1), 259-271. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/sd.2133

BE460 Organisation and Leadership in a Globalised World Assignment Sample

Assignment Brief

You are expected to write an essay of no more than 2,000 words

All submissions must be presented in typescript (MS Word format), 12pt, 1.5 line spacing.Note that late submissions will not be accepted unless full details of extenuating circumstances are provided. For details on extenuating circumstances please see the link in Moodle. If you have any query about extenuation, please contact “Academic Services Southend” (Gateway Building, 4th floor).

Essay Question

“Examine the role of organisational change by analysing a case study of change management in an organisation of your choice”.

The case study can refer to managing change in any type of organisation. You can thus choose to discuss issues of change in a for-profit company, public organisation, voluntary organisation, or social enterprise.

Indicative answers

A requirement for this essay is to describe and interpret how organisations change, what managers and leaders do to support change, and how employees may experience change based on evidence from your chosen case. The case chosen can be both about successful or unsuccessful change management as a departure point for your elaborations.

You should focus on internal organisational issues: for example, how leaders or managers communicate any required changes; how changes are introduced in different departments, and what kind of employees are involved and a what level. Often, this is about specific individuals and teams being involved as well as their motivation or resistance to change. Additionally, you can explain the reasons and effects of the case’s organisational change in relation to external stakeholders such as customers, suppliers and business partners as any of these can have an influence on how change is perceived, lived, and managed internally.

You will discuss or interpret organisational change with at least one change theory learnt in the dedicated lecture on organisational change (i.e. life-cycle theory; evolutionary theory, teleological theory and dialectical theory). It is likely that you may need to interpret different types of change with more than one theory or model.

You should describe the specific organisational context at the outset. The type and profile of the company should be brief but it is necessary. The context should include briefly e.g. business strategies as a background, as they prompt changes for employees. The essay will cover interventions or programmes that require effective change management. For example, an intervention for organisational change and how leaders or managers helped the process of change of groups, departments and individuals. You can also look at various types of training programmes to enhance new skills in departments and teams. You should add if such programmes are supported by particular HR policies.

Your elaborations may include selected concepts and points of analysis beyond “organisational change” for helping to illuminate aspects that are interrelated in the case. For example: resistance to change, organisational culture or teamwork and collaboration. You should explain all used terms also conceptually, at least briefly, not just merely mention them in one sentence as an ‘add on’. This will support a deeper discussion of different change practices, after you described events and behaviours.

Final recommendations given by a student can be based on relevant academic literature too, not just practical insights. Whilst any recommendation may be easier to imagine based on analysed unsuccessful or less effective approaches to managing change, they can be offered also for positive processes you have seen in the case study. That is, if the organisational change you analysed had been successful overall, you can still suggest as to what might be changed, emphasised or developed because organisations aim to maintain effective changes also in future.

Solution

Introduction

The 21st-century economic activities are characterized by regular as well as systematic changes in organizations. This is primarily due to the existence of a large number of rival companies in every sector of an economy. This is again due to the emergence of globalization and almost every country in the world is in this global competition. In addition, there is a continuous pressure of innovation that forces industries to change their organizational structure. This essay focuses on different aspects of change management that took place for the merger of two companies Astra and Zeneca. Moreover, the effectiveness of such a change would depend on the leaders of an organization. In this essay the UK based leading pharmaceutical company, AstraZeneca has been chosen for the analysis of this topic and this company adopted the tool of merger as its organizational change management. This company enjoys larger economies of scale after this change.

Discussion

Internal challenges faced by an organization (AstraZeneca)

Challenges due to diverse workforce: An organization faces internal challenges primarily due to the diverse nature of the workforce. Especially in the United Kingdom, there are several races that constitute the workforce. As a result, in an organization like AstraZeneca, it is evident that there would be several employees from different cultural as well as linguistic backgrounds. In addition, there are differences in talents, skills, knowledge and efficiency. Therefore, there may be some differences in opinions. If the leaders of the company are efficient in managing such issues, the problems could be resolved much easier by means of direct communication for best assignment help.

Improve operating efficiency: There may be a lack of operating efficiency in several companies and also world competition puts these companies in huge internal challenges (Dirani et al., 2020). Moreover, global leaders of the industry may face higher economies of scale and that forced other companies in the market to face huge internal challenges. This was the case with the companies Like Astra and Zeneca. They were forced to match with the economies of scale of other leading companies, such as Merck and Glaxo-Wellcome. As a result, they decided to merge, so that they can improve their operating efficiency by better utilization of assets.
Lack of communication: Another major factor that is responsible for any kind of internal challenge is the lack of communication (Delanoy and Kasztelnik, 2020). If the workforce of an organization does not get a clear vision about the goals of their organization, they become demotivated, resulting in the issue of internal crisis. The selected organization for the analysis of this essay AstraZeneca adopted the measure of automation in the department of human resources management may deal with this type of internal crisis.

Strategies to solve those issues

The pharmaceutical industry is highly competitive in nature and continuous innovation in this industry takes place. As a result, change management of several companies of this industry is a common practice as it was adopted by the two companies Astra and Zeneca and resolved their internal issues by merger in the year 1999. However, apart from mergers, there are several strategies of change management (Ali, Darmaningrat and Winardi, 2018). There are primarily four stages of change management, namely, understanding the issue, planning the change management, implementing those changes, and lastly communicating those changes.

Improvement in research and development: Several companies adopt this crucial strategy to sustain in the market competition. AstraZeneca’s biggest strength is that this company focuses on its effort to improve R&D, and this is primarily their core business strategy.

Improvement in marketing: This is another important tool of organizational change management. This may improve the performance of the company in the long run by enhancing the growth of the organization. AstraZeneca is one such company that has an excellent capability of marketing.

Innovative biopharmaceutical strategy: This strategy is an outcome of research and development, and AstraZeneca gives huge emphasis on this strategy. They exploit their strength of technologies of protein engineering, immunotherapies, small and large molecules.

Merger: This is an important strategy to solve the internal issue and sustain the global competition. Global leaders of the industry may face higher economies of scale and that forced other companies in the market to face huge internal challenges. This was the case with the companies Like Astra and Zeneca. They were forced to match with the economies of scale of other leading companies, resulting in, the decision to merge, so that they can improve their operating efficiency by better utilization of assets.

Implementation of strategies and communicating them: Any suitable combination of strategies should be implemented in the proper way and that should be communicated correctly to their stakeholders.

Reasons for organizational change

There are several reasons for organizational change management, such as cost-cutting, competitive innovations, failure, social changes, changing technology, changed market demand, changed government policies and so on (Rosenbaum, More and Steane, 2018). Companies in the pharmaceutical sector face challenges continuously due to competitive innovations, social change, changing technology, changed market demand and many more.

Larger economies of scale: After the merger which was the main change main change management tool adopted by two companies Astra and Zeneca, the company AstraZeneca enjoys larger economies of scale and now they can compete with global leaders of this industry. A large amount of employment is generated all over the globe and this company’s pre-tax profit has been increased by a huge amount after this organizational change. As a result, every stakeholder of this company has gained after this drastic step of merger.

Competitive innovations and changing market demand: One example of changing market demand is the change in production patterns in the previous two years due to the outbreak of the Covid 19 pandemic. This company was committed to supporting the global drive of fighting the Covid 19 pandemic over several fronts. There was a need for a huge clinical investigation as well as a potential medicine and vaccine development. There was an urgent necessity for the huge manufacture of these medicines and vaccines (Islam et al., 2019). Most obviously, the workforce of this company was not prepared to take such a huge challenge and so the organization faced a huge internal challenge (Stouten, Rousseau and De Cremer, 2018). However, the excellent leaders of this company managed to address this internal challenge during an emergency.

Changing technology: There are rapid changes in the use of technology as well as the innovation of new technologies. A company should adopt an organizational change to cope with these new technologies. The merger of Astra and Zeneca is a step towards strong research for adopting new technologies.

Social Changes: Another important reason for organizational change is social changes and its impact on the pharmaceutical sector is huge. However, due to the merger of the two companies to form AstraZeneca reached the expectations of new product launching, the enhanced scope of research, the creation of new jobs, an increase in the value of shareholders and so on.

Figure 1: Reasons for organizational change
Source: (Stouten, Rousseau and De Cremer, 2018)

Theory of organizational change

AstraZeneca is a very popular pharmaceutical concern that applies evolutionary theory for its organisational change management. This company focuses on organisational change management to handle their management perception and practice properly. In this part, this firm focuses on ecological models of change, which suggest perspective-changing guidance that applications give a better chance to develop their condition. This organisation chose Theory O and theory E in their change management process.

Theory O: This theory identifies those needed changes to a developed organisational culture that support learning and high-performance employees. This theory is similar to 'The critical path' and ‘Learning process strategy’ (Vargas et al., 2019). This theory approaches companies to integrate their culture that expands their capabilities and enhances their structure. AstraZeneca chooses this theory for their organisational change management process to change their organisation capability, behavioural changes, human capability, and many more that support their individual growth too. This theory approaches AstraZeneca as being able to change their corporate cultures such as values, norms, beliefs, and that help to increase their capability too.

Figure 2: Organisational change
Source: (Vargas et al., 2019)

Theory E: Theory E suggests programmatic changes for this organisation. This theory hardly changes economic initiatives. AstraZeneca focuses on this theory to develop their economic system, structure, and financial performance. This theory helps this firm to focus on legitimate measures for their corporate success (Cimini et al., 2020). This theory primarily focuses on increasing shareholders' value and suggests more effective strategies to increase cash flows and share prices. Through the help of this theory, this organisation was able to develop its financial performance and ability to economic improvements.

AstraZeneca focuses on those theories for their changing process which gives more simple and comfortable forms and ideas to increase their performance. Those throes approach different parts that help to balance their internal external factors and that also manage the change process. However, there are several resistances arise either from the stakeholders of each company or from other companies with which any of these companies had previous deals. In case of merger of Astra and Zeneca, Astra faced a resistance from one of its rival companies Merch with which it had a marketing deal. The UK company had to pay a large amount to get out of that deal. Merger is, however, a long process as there are several preparations needed for this change.

Business strategies

This organisation focuses on delivering life-changing medicines that contribute to the values of patients and society too. Their unique business strategy and structure give this firm more capability and presence. In this situation, in the world, the burden of disease and is changing increases the uncomfortable situation and for that reason, AstraZeneca focus to derived their scientific medicines at the doorstep of patients. Their fundamental strategy is very simple and clear. This firm focused on innovative science and leadership quality as their business strategy which claimed a better form of this company.

Innovation Science: Their business strategy includes innovative science that helps to expand their business and can deliver life-changing medicines (Balawejder, Sampson and Stratton, 2021). This scientific innovation gives a global presence and gives strength to this firm to emerge in their market. Their main strategy is to focus on those medicines which have created a specific market demand and changing life experience too. Their innovative strategies increase their market demand and availability of their brands too. Their innovations and science application increase their product sales and this business strategy and plan help this organisation to increase its productivity.

Leadership: AstraZeneca focuses on leadership quality and strategy to develop their business and change management process. This organisation focuses on leadership strategy which bridges the gap between strategy and performance (Ramazan et al., 2020). This firm focuses on leadership quality and their performance which help to maintain their business property and highlight an accurate business strategy too. They always focus their leaders to maintain their performance and their approaches give more plans and techniques to develop their business. Their main focus is to direct and motivate their leaders properly to develop their talent and that allows a lifetime goal for this organisation (UZCATEGUI et al., 2018). In this business strategy application, AstraZeneca achieved proper learning of their organisational transformation.

Recommendations

There are several recommendations for organizational change management for the company AstraZeneca. The merger of two companies was not possible overnight. There are several considerations that should be considered. Firstly, it is recommended to identify the need for change as well as planning for the same. Secondly, it is recommended to identify the strategy of the change. For example, Astra and Zeneca chose the strategy of a merger as the tool of organizational change. Thirdly, it is recommended to focus on issues like innovation for ageing people, chronic ailments as well as in medical treatments, the convergence of technology and healthcare, changing status of drugs, drug prices, reforms in healthcare, OTC growth, off-patent medicines, branded drugs and so on (Mishra and Schmidt, 2018). Fourthly, it is recommended to utilize social media platforms more effectively to improve relationships with prospective patients. Fifthly, it is recommended to understand the necessity of humanizing the organization. Sixthly, it is recommended to understand the present needs of society. Moreover, it is also recommended to the company to understand organizational change management, such as cost-cutting, competitive innovations, failure, social changes, changing technology, changed market demand, changed government policies and so on. Companies in the pharmaceutical sector face challenges continuously due to competitive innovations, social change, changing technology, changed market demand and many more. The company should try to make some new innovations in the segment of effective communication and marketing. However, this company is one such company that has an excellent capability of marketing.

Conclusion

It is revealed from the above analysis that organizational change management is the most important tool for sustaining market competition. Two companies Astra and Zeneca adopted the strategy of merger for organizational change. This analysis was based on several theoretical frameworks to understand the need for organizational change management. Global leaders of the pharmaceutical industry face higher economies of scale and that forced other companies in the market to face huge internal challenges and issues.

Reference list

BE284 Strategic Management Assignment Sample

• You are expected to write an essay of no more than 2,000 words (max. 2,200; minimum 1,800words).

• Please state the number of words in your assignment on the cover sheet/first page of your assignment.

• Please use 12-point font and 1.5 line spacing in your assignment.

• Note that late submissions will not be accepted unless full details of extenuating circumstances are provided. If you have any query about extenuation, please contact Academic Services (Gateway Building, 3rd floor); ebsadmin-southend@essex.ac.uk.

• Submission of individual essay Week 30 (of University calendar - Monday 25 April

BE284 Essay Question:

Using appropriate concepts and theories, analyse and evaluate Airbnb strategy to change its business model and become an empire in the hotel industry. Use the case study ‘The rise of a unicorn: Airbnb’ to answer the following questions:

1. Carry out a PESTEL analysis and five competitive forces analysis of Airbnb and identify the opportunities and threats.

2. Based on the data from the case (and any other sources available) and by deploying VIRO framework and Porter Value Chain model analyse resources and capabilities and identify the strengths and weaknesses of Airbnb.

3. Develop a SWOT analysis and suggest 3 corporate strategies that Airbnb can pursue for the next 5 years to Airbnb.

4. Discuss how your suggested strategies, regarding to Airbnb’s culture and history, can help Airbnb to achieve differentiation, or cost leadership strategies in the next 5 years.

• You may use material from outside the case if you wish to.

• Please cite any material that you use in your essay, using the Harvard referencing style.

Notes: Writing an essay for assignment help

• The introduction to your essay should provide a summary of your arguments that you use to answer the question. It should also set out in broad terms the structure of your essay.

• The main section of your assignment should provide the detailed arguments that answer the question. You should use appropriate evidence to support your arguments and you should make your interpretation of that data as clear as possible. You should not leave the interpretation of the data that you use to the reader.

• Do not be descriptive.

• Whenever you include some text in an assignment, you are, in effect, saying ‘this is important’. Always, therefore, ask yourself ‘why does the reader need to know this?’ Make the relevance of that material as clear as you possibly can.

Learning Outcomes:

1. Describe the key questions and associated challenges to be addressed in formulating an organisation’s competitive and corporate-level strategies

2. Appreciate that to sustain competitive advantage an organisation must harness its internal resources and capabilities and react appropriately to changes in its external environment

3. Critically apply a range of tools and techniques to illuminate the key questions of competitive strategy and corporate strategy

Solution

1. Introduction

The purpose of the study is to explore the transformation of the Airbnb business to complete and comprehensive hospitality industry. The purpose of Airbnb is to improve the quality and efficiency of the organization within the context of the work. The organization allows the property holders to register their property for rental purposes and cookie-cutter hotel rooms. The study is to explore the comprehensive analysis of the company with their surrounding environment. The strategy of the company is to be analyzed in the light of the external and internal environment considering its uniqueness and efficiency within the context of the workplace. The paper is to further analyze the leadership strategy utilized by the company in managing its resources.

2. PESTEL analysis

The pestel analysis provides a comprehensive knowledge of the different environment within the context of the workplace. The external environment of the organization is analyzed effectively.

Table 1: PESTEL analysis
Porter’s Five Forces

Porter’s five forces analyze the strength and challenges of the external environment where the company is moving.

Competitive Rivalry

There is significant competition as the major players such as Tripadvisors, Booking.com and HomeToGo. The competition is found to be high.

Power of the suppliers

The hosts are the suppliers as they are responsible for managing the effectiveness and efficiency within the organizational context. The power of suppliers is high as the service quality depends on the host efficiency.

Threat of Substitute

The threat of a similar product is high as there are several organizations engaged in managing the property in a significant and effective way(Biberet al., 2017).

Customer bargaining power

The bargaining power of the customer is high as they may easily switch to another organization without many experiences (Muller, 2020).

The threat of the new entrants

The new entrants could hardly make similar kinds of market share and property registration. The new entrant threat is low within the context of the workplace.

Opportunities

The company has the expansion opportunity. The company may also improve its network. Theconstant innovation and network expansion of the company will allow achievingcompetitiveadvantage. These are the potential opportunities that the company will gain.

3. VRIO framework and Porter Value Chain model

3.1 VRIO model

Table 2: Value Chain analysis

The organization is found to have focused more on the effectiveness and efficiency in managing the unique experiences it offers to the customer. The organization provides affordable accommodation to the consumer and improves their living experiences in a significant and effective way (Reinhold and Dolnicar, 2018). Customer finds the proper value in their money when they are interacting with the organization. Airbnb creates value for the customer and improves their effectiveness and efficiency within the context of the workplace. The customers are made partners and develop a significant relationship between the guest as well as the hosts.

3.2 Porter value chain model

The primary activities of the organization in the value chain analysis consist of inbound logistic operation of one logistic marketing and sales and service.

Figure 1: Porter value chain model
(Source: Simatupang, Piboonrungroj& Williams, 2017)

Inbound logistics of the organization is more concerned with the toad services. The inbound logistics of the organization does not require the extra cost of transportation. The global hospitality service brokerage company utilizes physical resources and incorporates mugs, pillows and other items from regular use. Airbnb Corporation is associated with the transformation of raw materials.

Service is the primary activity of the organization and managers that dream the world regularly. The company develops its support activities and proper management. It has incorporated a large number of properties as a part of the organization by allowing the property to register property on the website (Reinhold and Dolnicar, 2018).

Strength and weaknesses

The company has enough resources and opportunity to expand its operation. These are the potential strength of the organization. It will enable the organization to enhance its effectiveness and efficiency within the organizational context.

The company’s business model is conveniently imitable and it may affect the environment and erase its profitability within the highly competitive market situation.

4. SWOT analysis and suggest 3 corporate strategies

Strengths

The company is a lodging company and has a presence in 192 countries. It is a well-established brand and continues to focus on product expansion outside of its core business activity.

The company explores the opportunity for cheaper alternatives to hotels with global recognition. The company has a strong social media presence. It also provides good customer service in the context of the workplace.

Weaknesses

The company has been facing significant issues as a result of law and regulation violations. The computer may easily be the business system (Muller, 2020). The company has higher prices in some of the localities and it affects the efficiency of the business model. The review system of the organization is found to be highly ineffective.

Opportunities

The company has encouraged the use of mobile phones for booking and reservation and therefore it has developed a mobile application. An alternative model is a new concept and it has a significant opportunity to grow and develop. The incorporation of the dead asset has a deep impact on the organization.

Threats

The company is found to have faced a large number of cases in 192 countries. The changes in the regulation of the country affect its ability to operate. The company has already faced a large number of places in different parts of the globe. The rising competition has a potential impact on the organization.

4.1 Corporate strategy of Airbnb

Simplication of the customer journey with mobile applciation

The potential marketing activity of the organization plays a significant and crucial role in managing the operation and improving the quality of life. The launching the application will simply the customer journey in booking and reservation within the context of the workplace. The mobile application implementation will enhance its effectiveness and efficiency. The marketing activity using social media will enhance the capability and efficiency of the organization (Alhava, Laine and Kiviniemi, 2017).

Finding alternative funding for network expansion

The company may use crownd funding and sales of its equity for improvinf the business operation and business expansion. The organization must expand its network and operation to manage and explore the positive business strategy. The company is found to have incorporated a large number of organizations in managing its business success. Business expansion is essential for the organization and it is necessary to incorporate a large number of hosts to manage time and effectively overcome the barriers (Reinhold andDolnicar, 2018).

Adding remittance fee

The company needs to add fee in order to manage the better and effective increase in the margin. The simplification of the customerjourney is required to help its effectiveness. The effective and efficient management of resources is managed significantly within the context of the workplace. The simplification of the guest journey will improve the customer experiences with the world-class services offered by the organization.

5. Suggested strategies

The effective management of resources will help to manage and explore the organization of significant and effective (Reinhold and Dolnicar, 2018). Effective management of innovation of the mobile innovation will improve its market expansion making it easy for the host and customer to register their property and leadership approach within the context of the organization.

The company will manage its operation for the next 5 years using its potential techniques and innovations that will continue to expand its operation and enhance customer satisfaction (Muller, 2020). The company will obtain funding from crowdfunong and ales of the company equity. Theimprovement in the company requires better funding opportunity. The bank loan may affect the organization. It requires interest free funding option.

The expansion of the network of the organization by incorporating a large number of properties and hosts can be achieved with proper and effective social media marketing. A large number of hosts with a large number of properties will be attracted by the premium services offered to the organization. The use of social media marketing will allow the organization to reach within the context of the workplace (Alrawadiehet al., 2020). Network expansion will be improved its effectiveness and efficiency differentiating the company from the existing market leaders within the context of the workplace.

The simplification of the customer journey in the context of reservation booking and reaching the places will improve the consumer attraction towards but wrong. It can be done using the mobile application and further network expansion. The simplified process could be achieved with the use of technology and the organization will achieve technological efficiency within the context of the workplace (Alrawadieh et al., 2020).

5.2 Airbnb’s culture and history

The strategies of the company that have been suggested are concerned with the differentiation and cost leadership approach. The company has achieved a successful journey from a mattress company to a 31 billion company (Alhava, Laine and Kiviniemi, 2017). The effective management of resources is largely dependent on the efficiency of the culture and history. The company is found to have developed a unique business model that allows the stranger to sleep in another house and it has turned out to be a 31 billion company.

5.3 Differentiation, or cost leadership strategies

The company is found to have focused more on its differentiation strategy with the use of a unique business model that makes it different from other organizations and from another competitor as it focuses on allowing the changes in the stranger’s house and making it happen to earn a lot of money (Muller, 2020). The constant innovation of GPS tracking systems and improvement of the training helps to enhance a better and more effective outcome.

6. Conclusion

It can be said that an effective and efficient approach towards the management of resources and capability will help to improve effectiveness and efficiency within the context of the workplace. The development of the company is largely dependent on effective use of resources and capability and proper management of the resources. The newly added policy of the organization will be executed to ensure long term development of the organization.

7. References

Alhava, O., Laine, E. and Kiviniemi, A., 2017. The construction industry needs an AirBnb of its own!. WELCOME TO DELEGATES IRC 2017, p.566.https://repository.vtc.edu.hk/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1242&context=thei-fac-de-sp#page=569

Alrawadieh, Z., Guttentag, D., Cifci, M.A. and Cetin, G., 2020. Budget and mid-range hotel managers' perceptions of and responses to Airbnb: evidence from Istanbul. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management.https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/IJCHM-01-2019-0015/full/html

Aznar, J., Maspera, J. and Quer, X., 2019.A Game Theory approach to Airbnb and hotels competition. European Journal of Tourism Research, 21(21), pp.119-123.https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10548408.2017.1308292

Biber, E., Light, S.E., Ruhl, J.B. and Salzman, J., 2017. Regulating business innovation as policy disruption: From the Model T to Airbnb. Vand. L. Rev., 70, p.1561.https://heinonline.org/hol-cgi-bin/get_pdf.cgi?handle=hein.journals/vanlr70&section=40

Farronato, C. and Fradkin, A., 2018. The welfare effects of peer entry in the accommodation market: The case of Airbnb (No. w24361). National Bureau of Economic Research.https://www.nber.org/papers/w24361

Muller, E., 2020. Delimiting disruption: Why Uber is disruptive, but Airbnb is not. International Journal of Research in Marketing, 37(1), pp.43-55.https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167811619300679
Reinhold, S. and Dolnicar, S., 2018.Airbnb’s business model. Peer-to-peer accommodation networks, p.27.https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/30986/640674.pdf?sequence=1#page=38

Reinhold, S. and Dolnicar, S., 2018. How Airbnb creates value. Peer-to-Peer Accommodation Networks; Dolnicar, S., Ed, pp.39-53.https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/30986/640674.pdf?sequence=1#page=50

Simatupang, T. M., Piboonrungroj, P., & Williams, S. J. (2017).The emergence of value chain thinking. International Journal of value chain management, 8(1), 40-57.https://www.inderscienceonline.com/doi/abs/10.1504/IJVCM.2017.082685

Ye, P., Qian, J., Chen, J., Wu, C.H., Zhou, Y., De Mars, S., Yang, F. and Zhang, L., 2018, July.Customized regression model for Airbnb dynamic pricing.In Proceedings of the 24th ACM SIGKDD international conference on knowledge discovery & data mining (pp. 932-940).https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3219819.3219830

MGT302A Strategic Management Assignment Sample

Individual/Group - Individual
Length - 1,000 words, +/- 10%
Learning Outcomes

a) Describe and evaluate the objectives, aims and the primary aspects of a strategic plan whilst taking into account the vision and mission of the organisation.

b) Discuss and evaluate the processes and forces that influence the strategic decision-making process in relation to business strategy.

Instructions for Essay Writing help

This assessment requires that you consider each of the following:

? A brief summary of the theory of Porter’s Value Chain Model.

? Analyses of OPTUS’ value chain by finding specific application to each of the value chain components and providing an overall summary showing which parts of its operations create value and which do not.

? Your opinion on the usefulness and limitations of the Value Chain Model, using a Torrens Library academic journal article of your choice.

This Assessment is a ‘Reflective Essay’ Which Means:

? It is an academic analysis, using your own opinions as well as those of others. It still follows typical essay conventions, for instance, it should have a logical series of paragraphs and is structured with a beginning, middle, and end. It is appropriate to use headings for this essay.

? You need to critically reflect on your own thoughts and rationale, then integrate these reflections with appropriate theoretical concepts.

? It should be written in both the first and third person as directed in the suggested structure below.

A suggested structure for your essay is as follows:

? Introduction (approx. 100 words). Define the purpose and scope of your essay, including what you intend to cover. Identify, in a compelling way, why the topic is important. Explain its context. This section should be written in the first person.

? A brief summary of Porter’s Value Chain Model (approx. 200 words). Clearly and succinctly outline the theory underpinning the approach (does not have to be detailed). Use a number of academic references (lean heavily on the provided sources in Blackboard) to support the description provided. This section should be written in the third person.

? Application of the model (approx. 450 words). Here, taking each component in turn, describe and analyse the OPTUS value chain. Be purposeful and specific in applying each component of the model. Integrate relevant academic references. This section should be written in the third person.

? Usefulness and limitations (approx. 150 words). Explain the usefulness and limitations of the Value Chain Model, supporting your arguments with at least one academic journal article of your choice from the Torrens Online Library.

Note, the model does have critique and a balanced reflection should show the usefulness of additional methods of analysing the internal environment. Use references to support and justify your position. This section should be written in the first person.

? Conclusion (approx. 100 words). Summarise what you have undertaken in the essay along with the relevant conclusions and your own opinions. This section should be written in the first person.

Solution

Introduction

Strategic management is one of the most important parts of any business as it allows the organisation to shape their business approach more flexibly. It makes the business more consistent that is essential in the competitive business environment of the 21st century. This study is based on the strategic management of Optus using “Porter’s value chain model”. I feel that considering this study will allow me to understand the company's business environment better. Moreover, this study also helped me to shape the business strategy of Optus properly by applying "Porter's value chain model". I will also be able to understand the usefulness and limitations of "Porter's value chain model" through this study which makes the study more significant in terms of relevance.

Summary of Porter’s value chain Model

Porter's value chain model is one of the most effective tools that help to streamline the business process in an organised way to deliver better value to the business. As per the study of Anthony Jnr (2019), "Porter value chain model" shed light on primary attributes such as "inbound logistics, operations, outbound logistics, marketing and sales, and service" along with some support attributes such as "procurement, film infrastructure, technology development and human resource development". Value chain analysis of the company greatly allows the company to deliver better value to the company that leads to the mutual benefit of both company and customers. Company expenditure can also be controlled with the application of the “Porter value chain model”. It can enhance the level of profitability for the organisation that can deliver a competitive edge. As mentioned by de Moura &Saroli (2021), the “Porter value chain model” regulates drivers such as capacity utilisation, economies of scale, activity linkage, market entry timing, policy or practices of differentiation & cost and institutional factors. It can make the business more responsive which is essential for business survival in the competitive business environment. Quality assurance can be also greatly facilitated through the “Porter’s value chain Model”. It will make the products and services of the company more desirable.

Figure 1: “Porter’s Value Chain Analysis”
Source: (As influenced by Anthony Jnr, 2019)

Application of The Model

Inbound logistics

Inbound logistics plays a major role in the value chain of the company as it ensures the availability of required raw materials for the products or services required for the company. As per the official information Optus maintains a very healthy relationship with its suppliers which becomes key strength of the company as it allows the company to maintain better availability of their offerings. As per the official information output logistics of Optus relies on Ariba Network, SingTel and SAP Ariba (Optus.com.au, 2022).

Operations

Telecommunication, business investment and IT operations are the key operations associated with Optus. As stated by Cokins, Pohlen, &Klammer (2021), flexibility and reliance on operations help organisations to develop better profits. Hence, considering these operations Optus can generate their desirable profit that makes their operational attribute quite significant.

Outbound logistics

Singtel, MayneNickless, Cable & Wireless, BellSouth and AIDC Limited are the main outbound logistic service providers of Optus (Optus.com.au, 2022). The company does not possess an outbound logistic system that puts an impact on their distribution of service. It is one of the areas that the authorities of Optus need to work on.

Marketing & sales

The marketing and sales operations of the company rely on both traditional and online mediums. As per the study of Nor et al. (2020), consideration of both online and offline marketing and sales can ensure better reach to the targeted customers that deliver a better return in business. Hence, in this area, the telecommunication business of Optus delivers promising results.

Service

Telecommunication services, as well as financial services, are the key services of Optus allowing the business to maintain consistency in the growth.

Firm infrastructure

Firm infrastructure ensures the operational resilience of the company. Therefore, an organisation must possess a clear and effective infrastructure. The infrastructure of Optus is distributed among accounts, R&D, service and marketing & sales department which are quite basic (Optus.com.au, 2022). It is effective in quick decision-making however, lack of involvement of some crucial departments such as the operational monitoring team or department might create inconsistencies. Hence, this area needed improvements.

Human resource management

The human resource department of Optus delivers promising results by executing administrative tasks, recruitment and training activities.

Technology development

Optus recently worked on AI, 5G and lossless transmission that allows the company to offer seamless services.

Procurement

The procurement of Optus relies on service agreements and local supplier selection. However, the company does not emphasise more on the international level procurement resulted in a lack of acceptance of services at the international level.

Figure 2: “Value Chain Analysis of Optus”
Source: (Created by author)

Usefulness and limitations

"Porter's Value Chain Analysis" deeply emphasised the micro details of the industrial aspects. For this reason, I feel that maintaining synchronisation among the core activities linked with a broader strategic view becomes difficult and leads to failure in most cases. According to me,itmight be a very problematic aspect for Optus as company growth in the challenging market can be restricted for lack of effective broader and long-term strategic view. The article by Anthony Jnr (2019) also indicated that any organisations should focus on both primary and supportive activities in order to attain sustainable value chain. As opined by Presutti& Mawhinney, (2013), the main purpose of applying the value chain analysis is to evaluate company operations and properly shape them to deliver optimum value to a business as well as consumers. I think it can deliver a competitive edge that is useful. However, the value chain analysis is unable to establish proper linking between the activities that can be considered as one of the potential limitations(Anthony Jnr, 2019). I also observed from his article that it also makes monitoring of interrelated activities complicated which can be also considered as a limitation.

Conclusion

Strategic management is one of the key success criteria to maintain long-term consistency in the business process. However, from this study I feel that strategic management process of any business is only viable when a suitable strategic framework or model can be applied. The similarity has been also observed in the case of Optus, in which "Porter's Value Chain analysis" framework has been applied. From this study, I can conclude that along with consideration of micro factors of business it is crucial to monitor the broader perspective. Otherwise, the business is not going to be suitable for the long-term which might result in losing competitive positions in the business.Therefore, as per my perception shaping business strategy by applying "Porter's Value Chain analysis" can deliver extra flexibility to the business of Optus, that might lead to gaining competitive position easily. 

References

MGMT20144 Management and Business Context Assignment Sample

• This is a business case analysis essay that will be 1600 words +/- 10%

• Cover page: The essay must include a cover page that contains your name, student ID number, campus, assessment title, and lecturer/tutor.

• Format: Word document with appropriate layout and use of headings/sub-headings. Times New Roman, 12 size font and line spacing (1.5).

• This individual written assessment is designed to:

– Assist you to develop your knowledge of management and business contexts

– Give you the opportunity to enhance skills in research, professional responsibility, and written communication.

• All submissions must be uploaded through the Assessment Item 1 link on the unit Moodle page. Email submission to the Unit Coordinator is NOT accepted.

• The business case analysis can be uploaded as a word document.

• Penalties for late submission are applied according to the policy. This is 5% of the total marks for this assessment item deducted for every day the assignment is late.

Task description

1. You must first select ONE Australian organisation of your choice from the companies listed on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX). Search the company directory on the ASX website and select one Australian company for your assignment: https://www2.asx.com.au/markets/trade-our-cash-market/directory

2. Conduct research on your chosen organisation by selecting ONE or TWO of the below- mentioned topics (from week 1-5), with a focus on critically analysing the impact of a range of internal and external contextual factors on the performance and decision making of your chosen organisation:

? What is the governance structure of your chosen organisation and how does it ensure the effectiveness of the organisation's corporate governance?

? Which external environmental factors are influencing your chosen organisation’s performance and/or decision- making?

? What are the major risks your chosen organisation faces and how are they influencing its performance and/or decision making?

? What business practices does your chosen organisation adopt and how are they influencing its performance and/or decision making?

? What functional departments does your chosen organisation have and how are they supporting its business activities?

3. Your business case analysis must include at least eight (8) peer reviewed journal articles published after year 2010 from reputable journals (please see a list of recommended journals in the next page).

• Try to include the doi for each journal article in the reference list. For example: Derouiche, I., Hassan, M., & Amdouni, S. (2018). Ownership structure and investment-cash flow sensitivity. Journal of Management & Governance, 22(1), 31-54. DOI:10.1007/s10997-017-9380-x

You could search the library databases via the online ‘advanced search’ function of the CQUniversity library. By choosing the ‘advanced search’ function you can select the actual journal you wish to search. Recommended to use key concepts in week 1-5, e.g., unitary boards, PESTEL, risks, business practices etc. as search items to find the most relevant article to incorporate.

Solution

Introduction

The essay for assignment help discusses the external environmental factors influencing the performance and decision-making of 4DMedical Limited, an Australian organization enlisted in the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX)(Apostolopoulos, Apostolopoulos, Makris, &Stavroyiannis, 2021). It covers the governance structure of 4DMedical Limited and how the structure ensures the effectiveness of the corporate governance of the organization. The essay throws light on the major risks 4DMedical Limited faces and the consequence of these risks on the performance and decision-making of the organization. The essay also contains the business practices adopted by the chosen organization i.e., 4DMedical Limited, and the influence of the same on productivity and governance. Diving deeper, the essay discusses the functional departments of 4DMedical Limited and their support in business activities.

Case organization synopsis

4DMedical Limited is an Australian organization chosen from the companies enlisted in the Australian Securities Exchange. It is a global medical tech firm managing the analysis software of XV lung ventilation. It uses the 3D images of the lungs combined with time to give more accurate observation. Hence it becomes really important to study the governance structure, business practices, and functional departments of the organization. These include the external environmental factors and the major challenges faced by the company that has direct as well as indirect influence on the performance, productivity, and decision-making of the company.

Body

b) Which external environmental factors are influencing your chosen organization's performance and/or decision-making?

The external factors influencing 4DMedical Limited can be listed using Porter’s 5 forces. The model measures the competition faced by the organization and how the productivity of the company changes accordingly.

Challenges faced by rival companies

Companies like IDEA-Bio Medical, Mercuries, NeoChord, EMPIX Imaging, Sisu Global Health, and Fluidda are some of the rival companies of 4DMedical Limited(Rahimi Zarchi et al., 2018). The strategies adopted by these companies are usually relatively strong as compared to 4DMedical Limited. Due to this fierce competition, the performance of the chosen organization is greatly affected. Because of the common services provided by the competitor companies, It becomes difficult to increase the charges of the services and products offeredby 4DMedical Limited. Because of these competitors, it becomes difficult to make decisions about increasing the price of the products also.

Potential of New Entrants into the same industry

With the developing technologies, more new companies are entering the same industry as 4DMedical limited. The emergence of a similar 3D Imaging Company with potential services weakens the stability and reduces the performance of the chosen organization(Rahimi Zarchi et al., 2018).

Power of suppliers

Another external factor that influences 4DMedical is the suppliers of the company. A healthy supplier-buyer relationship means the raw materials and the updated technologies available to the company at the earliest at a good price. If there is a lesser number of suppliers in the industry for 4DMedical, it would result in a large amount of money spent on switching a supplier. On the other hand, a larger number of suppliers would mean a decreased cost of switching among the competitor companies (Wang, Yu?Lin, &Ellinger, 2011). Hence the organization spends a minimal amount of money on the inputs thereby making good profits and good performance.

Power of Customers

The 4th force of porter’s 5 force model is the power of customers. It is also one of the external factors contributing to the organization’s performance. When there is a largernumber of customers of 4DMedical, the performance of the company also increases (Maimone Ansaldo Patti, et al 2016). The organization can also increase the price of the service it is offering accordingly.

Threat of Substitutes

The invention of new technologies that can surpass the XV lung imaging, and ventilation analysis of 4DMedical serve as a threat to the company. Substitute technology can affect the performance of the company negatively(Hameduddin, 2021).

The porter’s 5 forces model not only increases the profits of the company but also helps in identifying the loopholes and developing new strategies. These external factors indirectly affect the decision-making of 4DMedical also.

The 4D medical is subject to some external environmental factors, that the company has no control over. The main external factor that affects the company’s performance and decision-making is the global economic fluctuations. Any global phenomenon may result in an external demand or supply side shock or boom that eventually hit the company's demand and supply and their overall performance as well(Aikaterini, Ioannis, &Vasilagos, 2019). Domestic and foreign inflation, as well as exchange rate, influences the company’s performance directly. The real value of the company’s assets and liability depends on inflation and the exchange rate. An unanticipated change in the country’s tax or wage law may affect the total cost of production as well as the price which in terms may affect the company’s decision-making(Hussain et al., 2021). There are possibilities of new firms entering the market and hence increasing the market competition which may go against the company’s favour. Another external challenge the company deals with is the sufficiency of funds for additional development of the company as whether it would be able to raise funds from the external market or not is something they cannot guarantee(Gibson, & Dibble, 2013). That means whether the company will or will not be able to take any expansionary policy, is uncertain and subject to risk. The company’s claim for a patent may not be recognized or partially recognized which again may harm the company’s interest(Hussain et al., 2021). Furthermore, the external factors are included below to analyse the chosen company's external environmental factors much more efficiently, where the PESTEL analysis has been used to depict the factors properly.

? Political

4D Medical is a part of the healthcare industry, and the government policy’s regarding the healthcare sector have a great impact on the company's performance. If the government's policy regarding the subsidies in the medical field or the pattern of government expenditure in the health care sector changes, it may have a positive or negative effect on the company accordingly(Hannila et al., 2022). Similarly, the change in GST (goods and service tax) in this field as well as the change in income tax law may have a severe impact on the company.

? Economical

The global economy along with the domestic economy can affect the company’s performance. Besides inflation and exchange rate, the nominal interest rate plays an important role as the interest rate is the factor that determines the level of savings and investment in the economy, which eventually determines the real value of the company’s assets and liability, the number of funds the company will be able to raise through the share market, etc(ChairulAnam, 2020).

• Social

The company's performance may be affected by social and cultural beliefs and misinformation. If there are any cases of unexpected spread of rumour that is based on false information or belief and turns people around from seeking medical assistance, there may be a drastic shift in the demand for the products produced by the company(Hannila et al., 2022). The presence of unprofessional influencers on social media who are sharing information that has no scientific base is becoming a burning issue day by day.

? Technological

The healthcare industry is highly dependent on the technological field. 4D medical uses SaaS technology in its production and bears a risk of technological supply error. There may be termination of their contract with their cloud supplier, and in case they are unable to find a new partner right away, the service provided by them may be disrupted(ChairulAnam, 2020). However, technological inventions and the country’s policies to develop the technological infrastructure will have a positive effect on the company’s performance.

? Environmental

4D medical dedicates its main focus on lung diseases and its vision is to create a world where people with lung diseases have “better outcomes and more hope.” Their field of attention has a direct connection with the environment (Bialowolski & Weziak-Bialowolska, 2014). With constant urbanization, pollution is increasing, accompanied by poor air quality. Besides, people's average exposure to harmful substances is increasing which increases the number of lung diseases and other medical issues(Hannila et al., 2022). While 4D medical provides an exact solution to this problem, it affects the company’s performance. On the other hand, the government laws about the environment and resource conservation will affect the company as well.

? Legal

Another important factor that is directly related to the health care industry is the legal sector. The imposition of new laws or changes in the existing ones can play a crucial role in the company’s decision-making. The laws regarding HIPPA, healthcare employer’s liability, Patient safety, etc. are some key factors that directly affect the company. The company is liable for its production, and customers can take legal action against the company in the case of the emergence of an unexpected feature or defect in the product produced by them, which increases the company’s risk. Besides the changes in laws about administration, tax restrictions, energy conservation also impact the company’s overall performance.

Conclusion

The essay provides a piece of knowledge on the external environment of 4DMedical Limited, an Australian organization enlisted in the ASX. The essay successfully discussed the governance structure and the external environmental factors influencing 4DMedical limited. The essay provided a brief analysis of the challenges faced by the chosen organization, the business practices adopted by it, and their influence on its performance and decision-making. The essay also provided an insight on 4DMedical Limited’s functional departments and their contribution to the productivity of the company.

References

MBA401 People, Culture and Contemporary Leadership Assignment Sample

The Assessment Task

Students will complete an individual essay which will explore and analyse the leadership of a contemporary leader.
Length: 1,500 Words (+/-10%)

Assessment Description

Students will research and analyse ONE contemporary leader drawn from a list provided by the MBA401 Workshop Facilitator. Students may not use any other leader, apart from those shown on the list provided for the purposes of this assessment. Students will select a leader they consider as being influential to them in their day to day living or career. Students will apply theoretical concepts covered in the subject to assist them to interpret the actions of the leader they have chosen.

The following elements should be included in the essay:

• The effect of the leader on the top management team of the organisations they have led.
• The effect of their strategic leadership in developing the human resources of the organisations they have led.
• The effect of the leader on the development of ethical practices within the organisations they have led.

Please refer to the assessment marking guide to assist in completing the assessment criteria

The essay will be assessed against the following criteria:

• Evidence of good academic practice in relation research, appropriate sourcing and referencing (see here for further details);

• Evidence of a development of a body of knowledge in the field of contemporary leadership and people;

• Level of analysis;

• Clarity of argument;

• Appropriate use of theory and relevant literature

List of CEOs to be explored for the assessment.

Choose one leader from the following list to explore for the MBA401 Assessment 1. Students may not choose any other leader for this assessment.

Leaders

Georgie Harman - Beyond Blue
Shemara Wikramanayake - Macquarie Bank
Oliver Morton-Evans - Neuromersiv
Tarun Gupta - Stockland
Matthew Halliday - Ampol Ltd
Alison Deans - Cochlear Ltd
Paul Perreault - CSL
Melanie Perkins – Canva

Solution

Introduction

With the rapid globalization and increased competitiveness in the global business environment, development of effective leaders and leadership behaviour has become a significant concern for all organizations. Leadership strategies and behaviours largely influence organizational members, which makes it essential to analyse them (Day, et al., 2014). The essay here aims to understand the effect of leaders on top management team of organizations, impact of strategic leadership in developing human resources and effect of leader on developing ethical practices in the company. For this purpose, Tarun Gupta, the CEO, MD and Director of Stockland has been considered as a potential leader for best assignment help.

Effect on Top Management Team

Tarun Gupta was appointed as the next Managing Director and CEO of Stockland in 2020. He was chosen as the next executive leader for having deep commercial experience and proven track record of managing and leading various large property operations (Stockland, 2020a). Tarun has been successful in gaining a strong reputation amongst property investors and high regards in the industry, which made Stockland’s chairman to depend on his leadership for the future of the company. Furthermore, he has had wide range of experience with regards to retirement living, investment management, community development and commercial property in his career (Stockland, 2020a). He has also performed numerous senior roles during his 26 years tenure at Lendlease where recently he served as the Group CEO. Thus, the widespread knowledge, skills and experience made Tarun as the perfect choice for the next CEO of Stockland.

The top management and senior leadership team of Stockland comprises of the CEO, CFO, Chief Legal & Risk Officer, Chief People & Stakeholder Engagement Officer, Chief Investment Officer, CEO Commercial Property, CEO Communities and Chief Innovation, Marketing and Technology Officer (Stockland, 2022). This senior management team under the guidance of Tarun’s leadership has been contributing towards the success of the organization. He has brought with him different skills and abilities alongside industry experience. Such skills and abilities have been beneficial for him to adapt in the new organization and further generate a positive influence on the top management team as well (Desai & Paton, 2014). This is evident from Gupta’s expected ability of better understanding property and housing business of Stockland with the Indian customers shaping the market. Tarun Gupta has been able to develop a vision for the top management team about how Stockland can be a significant part of providing affordable and entry-level housing to the migrants (Bleby, 2021). His leadership skills include being cautious about potential risks and strong work ethics that further influences the senior leadership team working with him. Moreover, Tarun also undertakes a humble approach for leading the top management team by embracing a collective organizational vision to attain greater good rather than focusing only on personal glory (Ou, et al., 2014). He emphasizes on realizing the unique potential of every top executive and empowering them to work towards the collective vision. This has been evident from his initiative of reshaping the Stockland Group with the help of senior leadership team for managing issues of problematic retirement business and bringing third-party capital from international market (Boyd, 2022). It has made possible to generate more cash for distributions in the company by leveraging its development capability and partnerships. Thus, this has contributed to the expansion and growth of business at Stockland.

Effect of Strategic Leadership

Strategic leadership involves a set of behaviours and attitudes undertaken for developing an organizational vision, strategies and fostering a culture of change. This leadership helps in providing the future direction to a company by displaying the purpose of growth and context for success (Azhar, et al., 2013). Tarun Gupta has been utilizing strategic leadership approach for telling the people what to do and how to do it to ensure the long-term growth, survival and success of Stockland. In this regard, his strategic priority has been to focus on the company’s purpose of offering better ways to life for all through values of community, excellence, accountability and respect (Stockland, 2021a). He further emphasizes on building a strong organizational culture with efficient brand and customer focus, which further motivates employees, managers, workers and other organizational members to work towards the same.

Gupta realizes that it is essential to keep the employees motivated and encouraged in the organization for managing and developing the human resources. His strategic leadership approach involves being concerned with the different activities and strategic choices of the human resources residing at the centre of the organization (Carter & Greer, 2013). With the changing dynamics of the global business environment, this strategic leadership at Stockland acknowledges the importance of diversity and inclusion for developing the human resources. The company focuses on enhancing the diversity of the workforce and fostering an inclusive culture with the help of strategic leadership. Here, the senior leaders and managers emphasize on maximizing the potential of all employees by appreciating and acknowledging their individual gender, backgrounds, ethnicity, physical abilities, family status, sexual orientation and thinking styles. This helps in encouraging diverse thoughts, informed decision-making processes and better business outcomes for the company.

Furthermore, strategic leadership also enables Stockland in developing an inclusive leader mindset and organizational culture. Here, the leaders focus on inclusive collaboration, empowering others, diverse thinking and ensuring psychological safety of the employees (Gotsis & Grimani, 2016). Strategies of open communication, fair treatment, cultural and emotional intelligence and continuous learning are often undertaken for building such an organizational culture to develop the human resources. The strategic leadership at Stockland further includes harnessing diversity alongside providing a true sense of belongingness and inclusion within the workforce (Stockland, 2020b). Here, every employee is provided with equal growth and development opportunities, fair and equal treatment, promotional chances, compensation and benefits, wellbeing and accessibility to information. This culture is maintained through appropriate and effective strategic leadership practices of flexibility, gender equity, wellbeing, accessibility and cultural inclusion and recognizing LGBTI+ minorities (Stockland, 2020b). Thus, it helps in enhancing social connection with the employees, providing them with opportunities and ultimately developing the human resources.

Effect on Development of Ethical Practices

Leaders are considered as crucial for moral actions in an organization by demonstrating virtuous and strong moral character. Ethical leadership involves both transactional and transformational approach for motivating their followers to behave in an ethical manner by using rewards and punishment systems (Fehr, et al., 2015). Tarun Gupta, as the CEO of Stockland, displays appropriately normative conduct through his personal actions and other interpersonal relationships in the organization. This promotion of ethical conduct takes place through two-way communication, decision-making and reinforcement in the company (Demirtas & Akdogan, 2015). Here, such ethical leadership behaviour helps in shaping attitudes of employees and other organizational members, thereby motivating them to act ethically. This is because the ethical judgments of the leaders have strong influence on the followers or employees in the organization.

In today’s business environment, establishing a culture for promoting and supporting ethical behaviours has become essential for the companies to attain sustainable growth, positive brand image and strategic superiority (Demirtas & Akdogan, 2015). In this regard, Stockland focuses on fulfilling its long-standing commitment and track record towards using an ethical and sustainable way for conducting business. Effective senior leadership enables the company to continuously innovate and pilot test the scalability of different circular models for reducing its environmental impact. This leadership also provides significant importance on enhancing and supporting the local communities and ensuring their personal wellbeing (Stockland, 2021b). Thus, Gupta’s leadership commitment has been able to continue the business operations in an ethical and sustainable way with the help and support from employees and partners.

Stockland undertakes a holistic approach for dealing with sustainability issues that has helped it to create liveable communities and delivering highest standards of social, environment and governance. The company focuses on challenging the status quo and achieving sustainable economic, social and environmental outcomes (Stockland, 2021b). This has helped it to reduce property emissions, enhance employee engagement score, increase savings from emissions reduction and increase community investment of health, education and wellbeing initiatives. These have been possible because of the CEO ethical leadership and sustainability initiatives undertaken in Stockland. Such ethical leadership has enabled organizational members in following actions and policies for enhancing the company’s environmental, social and economic performance (Wu, et al., 2015). Thus, effective leadership helps in developing ethical practices by fostering an ethical climate in organizations.

Conclusion

The essay aimed at analysing the effect of leader on top management teams, influence of strategic leadership in developing human resources and impact of leaders on the development of ethical practices in organizations. For this purpose, it considered Tarun Gupta, CEO of Stockland for studying about the effects of leadership on individuals in the organizations. It was found out the leaders influence top management teams by providing them with a clear direction and vision. These leaders also undertake various strategies of diversity and inclusion to treat all employees equally and develop the human resources. Lastly, effective leadership also helps in developing ethical practices in organizations. 

References

BST720 Leadership, Work and Organization Assignment Sample

Please read the following instructions carefully.

Please refer to the assessment criteria provided on page 3 of this document prior to undertaking the assignment. Please take time to think about and read around your topic, both in terms of theory and in practice before trying to write your answer.

This assignment is in the form of an essay.
- Essay is 2,000 words +/-10% and excludes references and appendices.

The Case Study – Uber: #What DoYouDo
(Source: Harvard Publishing).

This case-study is based on a 2017 blog post by a former Uber employee, Susan Fowler and created for pedagogical purposes. Fictitious names for some roles have been used. In this blog, Fowler was brutally honest about sexual harassment, the sexism, the bro culture and the failure of HR and Senior Management at Uber1.

Please read the case study carefully

You have recently been recruited as the Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO) of Uber and you have an upcoming meeting with the Senior Executive Team (SET) in two days. You will be sitting alongside Ariana Huffington, founder of Huffington Post (the only woman on Uber’s Board) and Kalanick, the CEO of Uber.

YOUR ESSAY

You will provide a critical evaluation of organisational culture in Uber; identify the problems and provide a set of recommendations for consideration by the Senior Executive Team (SET).

Overall comments on the written part:

This part of the assignment provides you with the opportunity to interpret organisational culture in a number of ways but try not to be too broad in your discussion.

You may wish to consider some of the following in relation to Uber:

• leadership and consequences as well as impact/influence on organisation culture

• the relationship between leadership and followership in organisations in perpetuating organisation culture. You may also want to critically consider the different ways in which these roles are recognised, rewarded and developed in organisations

• You may decide to look at gender diversity as well as organisational practice to ensure the answer is grounded in terms of a critical organisational analysis

• The role of HR in leadership, organisation culture and change

Important to any discussion would be a clear structure and ‘line of logic/analysis’ which leads you to some recommendations that will be practical to the organisation. It must be noted that this is an academic paper with a practical application.

Sources of Information:

Your lectures will not have captured everything and you can/should use material from other sources. Look at your reading lists as well as online journals, newspapers, videos etc. But do not overwhelm yourself, be practical and try to focus your search and your reading. And be critical in your writing.

Structure of Essay:

Guidance will be given in your workshops; you may use the following sequence:

• Introduction
• Body (main discussion area based on thematic areas/arguments)
• Recommendations
• Conclusion
• References
• Appendices

Assessment Criteria for Written Assignment

• Your written work will be done as an essay. It IS AN ACADEMIC PIECE OF WORK and must be written accordingly.

• The assignment has been designed to encourage theoretical, ethical and practical thinking around core conceptsstudied on the module. Marks are awarded according to

Assessment criteria (see page

• Be very, very careful not to copy texts, even single sentences. Plagiarism is absolutely forbidden. To make sure that you are not accused of plagiarism, ensure that essays are fully referenced and have a bibliography. Keep direct quotesto a minimum and always attribute theirsource with full referencing (name of author, date of publication, page number of original text. You should use the Cardiff Harvard system of referencing which is summarised on the student intranet as well as the library webpages. Here are two links that may guide you:

• https://xerte.cardiff.ac.uk/play_4191#page1

• https://intranet.cardiff.ac.uk/students/study/study-skills/academic-writing-communication- and-referencing/citing-and-referencing-support

Please take all these points above into consideration before starting any written work.

Solution

Introduction

Work culture and organizational behaviour is something which is one of the most important concerns that is needed to be in any organization. Leadership is one of the crucial jobs of HR practice upon which the whole organizational culture depends. This assignment is an essay on work, leadership and organization of Uber. This essay will critically analyze this service based company on the basis of an case study named “Uber: #WhatDoYouDo”. Susan Fowler, a former Uber employee had posted a blog in 2017 revealing sexual discrimination, sexism and sexual harassment within that organization. This essay will critically discuss the role of leadership, HR practice, and organizational culture with consideration of this incident.

Company background: Uber is a globally renowned cab service company which was founded by Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick in 2009. The company has its headquarters in San Francisco, California, and runs its operations in more than 900 metropolitan areas throughout the world. This company was formerly started up to offer cab services but now it provides services like rentals, couriers, food delivery, bike or scooter riding, package delivery and many more like these. Uber only offers riding services, they do not own any car, they only share a 25% commission from every ride or booking. This company had managed to earn approximately 14.1 billion USD in 2019 from rides and food delivery services (statista, 2022). They have been able to raise their profit from food delivery services to 3.9 billion USD during the lockdown period last year. Uber technologies run its functional operations with more than 22800 employees globally.

Critical Discussion

Organisational leadership

Leadership has a tremendous impact on organizational culture as leaders act like the pillars in a workforce of any organization. Leaders not only guide a team, but also they conduct the actual functional operation in any business. Leaders are the ones who manage their whole team and make an organization perpetuate. Efficient leaders need to display a positive vibe in them so that other team members can follow them. It is found that employees in an organization are very much influenced by their leaders in terms of motivation to perform well. A good leader makes his subordinate employees feel themselves as important parts of an organization, which leads those employees to try harder in terms of good performance. Leaders are those ones who help their team members to understand their job roles clearly and achieve success in short goals (Hauff et al. 2018). These short goals in various tasks lead to the overall progress of a business. Managers or team leaders help a team to prioritize among several activities which not only saves time but also saves energy as well as resources. In this modern and digital era, international companies such as Uber can implement a contemporary leadership style instead of an autocratic one. Leaders as well as management need to make decisions on applying different strategies according to requirements of different situations for assignment help.

There are several negative impacts of improper leadership as an inefficient leader can lead to a mess in the whole functional operation in a business. A manager or team leader needs to maintain adequate communication with other team members. Strong words or rude attitude of a leader can demotivate their subordinate employees and it can break their confidence as well. Managers or team leaders have to play a vital role in an organization as only they can control a healthy atmosphere inside an office or any kind of workplace. Proper communication only can help employees to understand the instructions given by their manager or supervisor. A leader needs to convey messages or instructions in clear as well as firm language, otherwise the team members can be misguided (Hauff et al. 2018). In this case, Susan had received an unethical indication from her boss which is strictly against effective leadership. Unprofessional as well as emotional words need to be avoided by a leader while giving instructions; otherwise a misunderstanding can take place, which can disrupt a healthy atmosphere in a workplace.

Organisational culture and HRM roles

Members of a HRM team always try to retain their most efficient workforce as much as possible as it lies under their job roles on behalf of a business firm or organization. This is a quite common tendency of HR professionals but this incident reveals something else that is more like ignoring a serious complaint coming from a newcomer is not at all acceptable at any cost. Susan was also a part of the workforce in this business and there was a huge probability of getting her as another star to the workforce in Uber technologies. Moreover, HR professionals are there to solve any kinds of issues raised from their employees for the sake of a good and healthy work culture in an organization (Yang et al. 2021). They can at least create an investigating team to verify complaints if there are any, coming from their employees. This tendency of the HR management team can be considered as not only an issue of negligence but also a case of biases towards older employees. Any of the employees, whether he or she is one of the most committed or efficient towards a job, should not be allowed to conduct any sort of unethical behavior to other employees within an office. These kinds of behavior are huge barriers for creating an efficient organizational culture.

Employees remain motivated towards their work when they get appreciation as well as positive reinforcements from their team leaders. As per Susan’s blog, she did not get the desired transfer even after proving herself in several jobs and scoring perfect in terms of performance. Rather than she got a negative review from her manager for personal issues. No manager is supposed to target any employee and rate her negatively without any documented reason (Van Mierlo et al. 2018). This is strictly against an efficient leadership practice in an organization. A potential employee can expect appreciation instead of wrong as well as illegal indications from her colleagues or managers. A healthy atmosphere and competent work culture should not support or entertain these kinds of incidents in their office.

Equality and gender diversity in organisational culture

According to her blog, Uber technologies was full of sexism as well as sexual discrimination, as female engineers were accounted only 6 among 150 engineers of the workforce in this company. She had mentioned in her post that female engineers even after scoring well in terms of performance did not get leather jackets that were given to all male engineers as the company was getting a huge discount for a bulk order of male jackets. They were not ready to buy jackets with fewer discounts for only six women at the office. This is clear racism! Employees regardless of their gender are supposed to be treated equally and deserve to be rewarded according to their performance. Female employees, in a good organizational culture, deserve to get equal appraisal or consideration from the supervisors as men.

According to Forbes report, there is at least a 7% of discrimination in the payment process between male and female employees in this company, that is male engineers are paid 7% more than female ones for equivalent designation (Forbes, 2022). Even it is clear from their report that chances of getting a promotion is totally ‘gender blind’ here! This tendency among any workforce is strictly against the work policy of the HR professionals. HR management members are supposed to display a behaviour of complete equality irrespective of gender, skin colour, or cultural as well as religious belief. The management of Uber technologies is to be terribly criticized. Uber management claims to pose fourteen moral values and meritocracy are one of them, but this tendency of them is completely contradictory to their claimed values (uber, 2022). It is clear that they do not always support meritocracy in reality and let people get what they actually deserve according to their merit and performance. Another significant value that this cab service company claims to pose is toe-stepping or sharing ideas regardless of their post or seniority during a meeting. The fact is, employees as well as senior managers in this organization use this idiom for being rude and behave badly to others inside their office. Often newcomers have to face this kind of behaviour from their seniors. Job roles of the HRM is not only creating business strategies and executing action plans, but also they are supposed to show respect to every employee as a human and consider the moral values and ethics of each of them.

Role of HR in leadership, organisation culture and change

Leaders have the power to control or defuse any scopes of gossiping inside an office. In addition to that, leaders or managers are the one who can deal with any complaints coming from one of their employee bases. Fowler met other female engineers in her office and got to know their stories of getting the same indications from that very same person. She decided to escalate this to the higher authority, but was not entertained again. She was even threatened for talking to other girls or gossiping at office premises. Here, the HR professional is quite right as defusing or at least discouraging gossip inside office premises are duly expected from management, but in this case, they could have listened to her as her problem was more serious than gossiping.

It has been also found out that a nasty booze culture was common in the Friday night party arranged at Uber office premises. These parties were full of sex, drugs, Marijuana and many like this and they call it “Bro culture”. This is not an example of a healthy office culture as not all employees are supposed to be comfortable with these kinds of party culture, and if they do not, their decision should be respected by other employees. Fowler could not fit herself into this culture and decided to change her job though she was not the only one who wanted to quit job at Uber. This company had at least 25% of female engineers by 2015 and the number had reduced to only 3% by 2017 (susanjfowler, 2022). However, Uber management claims to have now somehow changed their policies and work culture and has been able to raise their female employee number to 40% by the year 2021. A rich organisational culture not only maintains stability in the workplace but also increase the employee retention that also helps to minimise the overhead cost. Hence HRM plays an important role in organisational culture. The culture is not a healthy culture in Uber and there should be limitations. Such cultures also degrade the goodwill of the company as well. Uber HR must consider such aspects and try to maintain a healthier approach towards organisational cultural aspects. Human resource leaders are vital to corporate growth. They help achieve strategic goals and objectives by providing complex and innovative leadership strategies. HR leaders mediate between senior management and employees and defend matters on behalf of employees. They promote awareness and guide all levels of the organization through change and transformation. They train both managers and employees on company culture and best practices for living and working together (Zhao et al., 2020). In addition, HR leaders develop metrics and other performance indicators and continually make changes based on overall performance. When an organization has at least one person overseeing these activities, it ensures that the strategies remain effective and bring return on investment (ROI) for change. Personal empathy reinforces leadership qualities in HR activities because it helps HR professionals assist employees with personal problems. These problems can occur when an employee is facing a death in their family or is in a difficult work environment like Uber where bad culture impacted the organisational growth aspect.

Whether change is needed, needed, right or all three, respect is an important part of it. And human resources have an important role to play in ensuring that change is defined, developed and implemented respectfully. The behavioural skills required by HR professionals allow employees to participate in necessary change in their own hands through things like relationship management, critical evaluation, and leadership mentoring and roaming. Change is important for HR as human resource work will keep on changing along with it and in this case, Uber desperately in need of cultural change. Changes in HR are long-term structural changes. Therefore, although many HR principles are still the same, the way HR is run will and will continue to change. These changes will require organizational leadership, but for change to occur, change must occur from the bottom to up. Therefore, for it to be truly successful, the focus must be on change in human resources at all levels (Cohen, 2016).
Importantly, the human resources department of Uber should be encouraged to seek potential contributors to convert and encourage other employees to join the program. Since there are people in the human resources department with organizational and personal competencies, getting their help to sustain change is an important factor in the change management process.

Recommendations

These kinds of incidents are harmful for the reputation of an organization and can impact on their sales rate as well. Chances of these kinds of events can be reduced or avoided through proper actions taken by the governing bodies and managing directors in an organization. Managers of this company can be given training on leadership practice as some of them are found to misuse the power of a leader. They need to understand the concept of an efficient leadership so that they can implicate that knowledge in their daily activities for the sake of this organization. All employees including team leaders and managers need to participate in gender equality awareness programs arranged within the office premises. Employees can be given activity tasks such as role playing activities that can make them feel things from a woman’s perspective. Strong HR policies can be created as well as activated in the work culture as soon as possible and tough penalties can be declared in case of violation of those policies. More female employees can be hired in the HR management team so that they can deal with these matters with empathy. ‘Green HRM’ practice can be introduced within the work culture of this company so that a healthy work atmosphere can be retained and an efficient organizational behavior can be ensured (Peng et al. 2020). Safety and security of female employees can be ensured thus more female candidates can be encouraged to join this company.

Conclusion

Leadership and work culture are inevitable parts of an organization for which an efficient leadership practice and a healthy work culture is necessary for a good reputation of a company. This essay has discussed critical evaluation of the case study of Susan Fowler who worked as an engineer in Uber technologies. This essay has critically discussed the role of leadership, HR practice, and organizational culture with consideration of this incident. It has analyzed and criticized this cab service provider company on the basis of a blog posted by Susan in 2017. This essay has also recommended some potential strategies that can be suitable for this organization to regain their reputation.

Reference list

Cohen, D. (2016). What is HR’s Role in Managing Change? [online] SHRM. Available at: https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/trends-and-forecasting/special-reports-and-expert-views/pages/deb-cohen.aspx [Accessed 13 Jan. 2022].

Forbes (2022) Uber's Gender Pay Gap Study May Show The Opposite Of What Researchers Were Trying To Prove Available at; https://www.forbes.com/sites/avivahwittenbergcox/2018/09/23/gender-paygap-uber-case-study/?sh=650a3f9eb555 [Accessed on 12.1.22]

Hauff, S., Guerci, M., Dul, J. and van Rhee, H., 2021. Exploring necessary conditions in HRM research: Fundamental issues and methodological implications. Human Resource Management Journal, 31(1), pp.18-36.

Peng, J., Yin, K., Hou, N., Zou, Y. and Nie, Q., 2020. How to facilitate employee green behavior: The joint role of green transformational leadership and green human resource management practice. Acta Psychologica Sinica, 52(9), p.1105.

susanjfowler (2022) Reflecting On One Very, Very Strange Year At Available at; Uberhttps://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very-strange-year-at-uber [Accessed on 12.1.22]

uber (2022) About Us Available at; https://www.uber.com/in/en/about/?utm_campaign=CM2058205-search-google-brand_77_-99_IN-National_driver_web_acq_cpc_en_Generic_Exact_uber_kwd- 169801042_496400217099_122940583368_e_c&utm_source=AdWords_Brand [Accessed on 12.1.22]

Van Mierlo, J., Bondarouk, T. and Sanders, K., 2018. The dynamic nature of HRM implementation: a structuration perspective. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 29(22), pp.3026-3045.

Yang, F., Huang, X., Tang, D., Yang, J. and Wu, L., 2021. How guanxi HRM practice relates to emotional exhaustion and job performance: the moderating role of individual pay for performance. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 32(11), pp.2493-2518.

Zhao, S., Liu, M., Zhu, C.J. and Liu, H. (2020). The role of leadership in human resource management: perspectives and evidence from Asia Pacific. Asia Pacific Business Review, [online] pp.1–5. Available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13602381.2020.1779496.

BE253 Creating and Managing the New and Entrepreneurial Organisation Assignment Sample

Assessment Brief

Assessment for this module is based on coursework which will take the form of an individual essay on the following topic:

The Development of an Individual Creative Action Plan

Students are expected to write an essay on the student’s propensity to enterprise, self- assessment of entrepreneurial capability; identification and validation of opportunity and the creative conception of new venture idea (word count – max., 2,000 words).

Assessment task

For your “Individual Creative Action Plan” (ICAP) you are expected to discuss your new venture idea focusing particularly on:

• Your own self-assessment for starting and managing the new venture.
• The source of the business/social venture/project idea/innovation.
• How did you identify the opportunities that led you to the consider idea for the new venture?
• How you intend to go about developing the idea, resourcing it, identifying its market and its business viability and developing an outline business model?

What follows is a guide for the ICAP including the key points that should be covered:

• Your own Self- Assessment: How have you carried out your self-assessment? What tools (tests from the Internet) did you use? What do the results show? Do they reflect what you know about yourself and your entrepreneurial characteristics, strengths and weaknesses? Try and be as objective as you can and do not rely simply on SWOT analysis. (20%)

• The Business Idea and Unique Value Proposition: Explain the main idea/innovation you intend to bring to market, along with the uniqueness of the idea i.e., the unique value proposition. How does it address an economic and/or a social problem? How will your idea solve that problem? Think about the new value your business/social venture brings to your customers and the wider community. . (Note: This is an important part of your assignment. You should focus on explaining the uniqueness of your idea and the value it adds to your potential customers). (20%)

• Source(s) of ideas/innovation: Explain the main source(s) of ideas/innovation for your new venture. For example, you can focus on explaining sources of idea based on Drucker’s seven sources of innovation. (5%)

• Identification of resources: Explain the main resources (finance, people, networks) you will need to start your new venture. You should focus on explaining the resources you’ll be using, taking into consideration their advantages and disadvantages. Who will be your suppliers and distributors? Try and think of a sum of start-up capital you may need to start or grow and explain why. (10%)

• The Market for your Venture: Here, you should provide a summary of the market you wish to enter and why, your knowledge and understanding of the market and how it works, how will you enter and what share of the market you might obtain, why it is a good market to enter and what are the alternatives. You should also explain who your customers are going to be and how will you attract them to your venture

• The Business Model: Consider what could be the business model that might generate overall value of the business to you and your customers; how will this value be generated (income streams; brand value; value of goods and products; sustainability, etc.). Think of the business model for a similar and existing venture to help you determine what could be learnt from such a venture (5%).

• You, your team and Your Network: focus on the mix of competencies and capabilities of your team you will need and why, how you complement each other, how that will be relevant to your venture; what are your current and prospective networks, who will you connect with and why? (10%)

• Limitations and Barriers: Consider what might prevent you from starting up, or what might affect the development of your start-up? How might you overcome those barriers? (5%)

• Conclusion and Implications – Conclude with suggestions of what can be learned from your Individual Action Plan. (5%)

The percentages in brackets denote the importance of each of the above points that need to be covered in your ICAP.

Solution

The Business Idea

In order to establish a self-owned venture, it is very significant to understand the needs of the market and the choices of the people in the area where the business is determined to be set up. The choice and interest of the individual also matter in that step and needs to be taken into consideration. Therefore, the idea that has been thought of is of setting up a bakery business as a loyal customer base is self-generated in this process. The business is planned to be set up in the main city as analysis has been done that people are looking for ways in which they can maintain their diet and are looking for alternatives from the current bakery procedures.

Self-assessment

Figure 1: Entrepreneur test
(Source: Psychometrictest, 2013)

An online self-assessment test has been conducted to check the entrepreneurial skills which helped in understanding about me and my entrepreneurial knowledge. These mark the entrepreneurial characteristics and have, helped in understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the business idea. A brief overview of the strengths and weaknesses along with the opportunities and the threats are provided below for management assignment help.

Strengths

• Separate food processing equipment for different kinds of food.

• Marketer with experienced staff

• Customer-oriented

• Great location

• Experienced staff in Gluten Diets Weaknesses

• No prior experience of running bakery

• No industrial experience in production

Opportunities

• Unlike other food items mostly, baked food items are not seasonal

• Movement progress towards a healthier lifestyle Threats

• Entry of new competitors which might result in a slow initial growth

Unique value proposition

We have separate food processing equipment for different kinds of food items and the baked items which is the strength. The staff members who will be working are hired professionals in this business and tend to have at least 6 months of experience in the bakery business. Location wise, the business is thought to be set up in the city area which also comes as one of the perks. Coming to the weaknesses it can be noticed that the experience in the production field might be less for most of the members and the threat of new entries can be expected until a particular set of the customer base is set up and a base is not generated. The unique business idea is to produce gluten-free products for the customers and take a step forward in moving towards a healthier lifestyle. This has been done as people are becoming more health-conscious and are trying to be as choosy in food consumption as possible. Offering Gluten-free bakery products can help them to maintain their healthy diet and also enjoy the delicious servings without having to worry. Gluten-free products are rich in fiber and it maintains the freshness of the items which are produced (Mahmood et al., 2020). The age group of people of 30 years and above is to be targeted for this business as they are emerging in the society as the adults who are conscious about their food intake and are looking for alternatives to serve their choices. This is planned to be achieved by wearing gloves for the preparation and serving of food. Proper sanitization of the place after the tables is left by the customers and also offering online food delivery system for the people who are trying to avoid crowded places.

Another benefit of including gluten-free bakery products is that it promotes healthy weight gain (Kurniawan et al., 2019). People who are also trying to gain weight but not just fat can consider trying our products as they are healthy and at the same time can serve their choice as well. This unique idea is therefore planned to add value to the business and further help in adding to the potential customers.

Sources of Innovation

In order to understand and reflect on the sources of information, Drucker’s seven sources of innovation has been used-

• Unexpected occurrences

It is often stated that unexpected failure and an unsuspected occurrence of an incident can be the source of innovation opportunities. Therefore, many while looking for ways to establish a new venture have considered this process.

• Incongruities

Incongruity can also sometimes lead to the innovation sources as a rhythm of the needs are identified in this process. This has been helpful in thinking of the bakery venture idea as in the market, steady growth has been observed after the analysis with the given unique idea.

• Process needs

The needs of the place can also give rise to new sources of innovation, as it marks the establishment of such a business that can be consumer-oriented and can help in up-liftmenof the place (Buta, 2019).

• Industry and market changes

The changes in the market sometimes can also act as the source of a new idea or venture.

• Demographic changes

While deciding on a new business set-up, demography plays a significant role and it has been one of the least risky entrepreneurial choices that have been known to be most rewarding.

• Changes in perception

Changes in the perception of an employee and the manager or the customer and the employer can also lead to a source of innovation (Yang et al., 2019).

• New knowledge

Innovation based on new ideas and knowledge has been historically proven to be of higher value (Ahsan et al., 2018).

Identification of Resources

Finance: The financial resources include personal investment and outside equity financing where a team will be involved. The initial budget is estimated to be $30,000.
People: the human resources include the high-level experienced staff that is hired for the bakery business.

Networks: premises and equipment including the industry experts can help understand the networks and establish better funding to reach out to the customers and set up a proper base. Suppliers will by own employees and distributors belong to the employees of my delivery department.

The market ventures

In order to establish a bakery business, the licensing and franchising market is decided to be targeted. For deciding the best choice for the customers, it is necessary to understand their needs at the moment.

Demographic segmentation: After a proper market analysis, it has been observed that the people above the age group of 30 are concerned about their health and are always in search of alternatives in the bakery products.

Psychographic segmentation: Taking this into consideration, the healthy way of serving the customers is decided by providing them gluten-free bakery products keeping the values of the customers on mind.

Behavioral segmentation: People who have a standard income and tends to acquire a strong purchasing power, people belonging to the economically empowered section of the society are targeted audience.

There are several benefits of entering this business market. Being one of the largest sectors in the world while improving the consistency and aroma as required. The seasonal availability is also high and one of the best choices of bakery business is that it is not seasonal and can be delivered all time of the year (Chun, 2018). Long-term preservation can also be observed in this particular field. Meetings and gatherings can be held in the main city where the target audience can be requested to join so that they can be acknowledged regarding the health benefits. In this way, the market for the venture is planned to be established.

The business models

The business model that has been thought of for this particular business venture is B2C business. This is a business-to-customer oriented e-commerce platform where the sales are involved between the business clients and the consumers on a direct basis (Buschow and Laugemann, 2020). The value that will be generated for the various platforms are mentioned below-

Figure 2: Business value segments

• Customer segments

The customers can be attracted towards purchasing from this store through clear advertisement relating to the health and dietary benefits that will be gained.

• Value propositions

Value propositions can be maintained through proper verification of the choices of the people and maintaining the production processes through complete safety towards the environmental concerns (Lin and Wang, 2019).

• Channels

The channels of the members can be generated through the funding process through the profit generated in the direct B2C sales considering the stakeholders, suppliers and distributors.

• Customer relationships

This can be enhanced with the help of advertisements where the customers can be made aware of the details of the products and services, which are planned to be offered in the business

• Revenue streams

The financial reports can be directly considered to be approached for the revenue streams. Key resources

• Key resources

The key resources can be the kitchen equipments, food materials and the financial resources along with the human resources.

• Key activities

Hiring of the staff members, advertisement, set up are the main key activities.

• Key partnerships

The key partnerships are will be with the distributors and suppliers of the business.

• Cost structure

The experienced people as they can provide better suggestions for the generation of other resources and what budget can be estimated with the help of this.

Amy’s Bread and Bakery, in New York City, is one of the renowned bakeries in America which follows the B2C business model for improving the business and reaching out to the customers in the best possible manner (Kropp et al., 2016).

Initially, it has been planned that 5-6 members will be hired for maintaining the financial resources and keeping a record of the monthly details. Apart from this, three cooks will be hired with serving staff members. All the staff that is hired will have a minimum of 6 months of experience in this bakery field so that no new risks will occur and it will be easy to gain the attention of the customers when they will be greeted with already experienced staff. The members will connect to the target audience in the direct advertising processes such as meetings and gatherings or connect with them on the digital platform such as social media websites or company websites. This can be of a great benefit to win against the other competitors in the market as initially, people do not have enough revenue but since our budget is quite affordable for us, we are planning to keep all the experienced staff members.

Risks and limitations

The financial risks can be high as the members who are supposed to be hired will be experienced and hence might ask for higher pay from the starting itself. Secondly, it is the first time that we are thinking of starting a business completely on our own with a new venture idea and hence the confidence level is set low. Another barrier might be observed in the time management processes as the management authorities will be limited initially and I have to look after the details of the business, the resource requirements and the availability of required funds for the procedures to be carried out in the most desirable manner.

Conclusion

It is not always necessary to succeed in the first go, we can always gain more confidence and experience through failures and hence taking this into consideration, the business can proceed. Relating to the needs of the customers is significant, and is the first step, hence we have planned out the market analysis and based on that prepared a SWOT analysis. After considering the self-assessment test, it has been observed that the entrepreneurial skills are well and can be considered for the business establishment. Also, the 9 segments of the business entry in the licensing and franchise market entry are referred. As this has been a great help, to understand where we stand and also make it clear to all the employees as to what is expected from them in the business. The risks, which are likely to occur, can be mitigated by keeping the business according to the plan and initially not taking huge targets. The training of the employees will not be required as they will be professional and experienced in this field already and this can be of great help to the people. The customer base can be further generated with the help of direct advertising techniques and using online media to connect to them regularly. Their online actions and feedback can also be noted for proceeding further with the business.

References

U24035 Customer Relationship Management Assignment Sample

Assessment Aim: The role of essay submission is to engage students for browsing the extant and modern literature readings, which revolves around subject developments in the recent era. It also refines students’ ability to understand the key issues related to subject; demonstrate the understanding of high-level of appropriate concepts, and comprehensive and critical analysis of central issues in the current age. Essay assessment will help students obtain LO1.

What is expected in the Assessment?

Answer the following questions:

1. What are the key differences between strategic, operational, and analytical CRM? Moreover, what makes social CRM different from traditional CRM?

2. A leading British mobile phone company publicly announced a few years ago that it was no longer offering new customers more attractive offers than its current customers. Promotion offers to encourage switching were endemic in the market. How might this new policy affect customer acquisition? Do you think it a wise move?

3. Conduct an interview with sales and/or marketing managers in a business-to-business or business-to-customer organization with a view to identifying that organization’s or those individuals’ understanding of what counts as a strategically significant customer. How does that construal differ from the classification presented in the book (Buttle and Maklan (2019). Customer Relationship Management: Concepts and Technologies)?

4. After the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, firms/organisations opted to interact with the customer virtually in every industry. How, in your opinion, should the CRM process be changed/improved to address any such environmental disruption/hostility in the future?
Please address each step of CRM processes and support your answer with an example.

Word Limit: 1200 words, excluding footnotes and reference lists. The word count should be stated on the university front sheet. Failure to state a word count will result in a 5% penalty. A falsely stated word-count is an assessment offence, resulting in a penalty, including reducing the mark to 0%. Note that footnotes may be used to reference sources only. Examiners are free to disregard footnotes that contain inappropriate information or information that should belong in the main text.

The Write-up: The write-up is a reflective and evaluative account of the work you completed. You also need to carry out some research and support all your answers with references. Moreover, please use Arial 12 font size and use justify option from the paragraphs section in the HOME Tab of MS Word. Moreover, please insert a table of contents, list of figures (if any) and list of tables (if any) at the start of the report, furthermore, please also insert a title page with your name and student number.

Referencing: Students must reference sources using APA 7th. Guidance on this method of referencing can be found at www.referencing.port.ac.uk. Reference should be made to the primary source, except when the primary source can no longer be obtained. Poor citation of sources will result in a loss of marks.
Plagiarism: Students are reminded of the need to avoid plagiarism. The University Regulations describe plagiarism as:

1. The incorporation by a student in work for Assessment of material which is not their own, in the sense that all or a substantial part of the work has been copied without any adequate attempt at attribution, or has been incorporated as if it were the student’s own when in fact it is wholly or substantially the work of another person or persons.

2. Any student suspected of plagiarising will be referred to the Head of Department and an Academic Misconduct Hearing will be arranged. Students should ensure that all sources are fully cited in footnotes and in the bibliography and that, indentation or quotation marks (as appropriate) are used when quoting. Failure to include a bibliography will result in a 5% penalty, unless the lecturer/tutor has advised you that a bibliography is not required.

Solution

I. Introduction

The study aims to highlight the major differences between the different types of CRM technology (strategic, operational, and analytical) that are adopted by Organizations. The study has emphasized the key differences between the traditional CRM and Social that are used by Organizations. Furthermore, the impact of the changes in the promotional strategies adopted by the British mobile phone company over the acquisition of Customers has been discussed in the study. An interview with the sales/marketing managers of both the b2B and B2C Organizations was conducted to retain strategically significant Customers. Moreover, the study has also focused on the impact of the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic on the different CRM processes in Organizations. The different modifications that are needed in the CRM processes in the Organizations to address future environmental disruptions have also been included in the study for a profound understanding.

II. Discussion

1. a. Key differences between the different types of CRM

CRM (an acronym for customer relationship management), is a business strategy that aims to improve customer satisfaction, and loyalty, and enhance the retention of Customers. The different approaches to CRM include strategic CRM, operational CRM, and analytical CRM.

Table 1: Strategic CRM vs. Operational CRM vs. Analytical CRM
Source: (As created by the Author)

1. b. Difference between social and traditional CRM

Social CRM is a type of customer relationship management (CRM) that involves using social media and other online platforms to engage customers and manage customer relationships for best assignment help .Traditional CRM typically focuses on managing customer interactions and transactions using technology like customer relationship management software.

Moreover, social CRM is a more interactive, customer-focused approach to managing customer relationships. Henceforth, by using social media and other online platforms, organizations can build stronger, more meaningful relationships with the customers, and also gain valuable insights into the preferences and behavioral attributes of the Customers.

2. a. Impact of the new policy on Customer Acquisition

If a leading British mobile phone company publicly announced that it was no longer offering new customers more attractive offers than its current customers, it could potentially affect customer acquisition. This is because many customers may be attracted to the company's services because of the attractive promotions and offer that are available. By limiting these offers to current customers, the company may be less appealing to potential new customers who are looking for the best deals.

2. b. Analysis of the policy implemented

In terms of whether the given policy is a wise move, the company's goals and objectives must be taken into consideration. If the company is focused solely on retaining current customers, the policy may be effective in reducing customer churn and increasing customer loyalty. However, if the company is looking to expand the customer base, this policy may not be as effective as yielding desirable outcomes.
One potential downside of this policy is that it could create a negative perception of the company among potential new customers. If customers perceive that the company is not offering the same attractive promotions to new customers as it does to current customers, they may be less likely to switch to the company's services.
Henceforth, the decision to no longer offer new customers more attractive offers than current customers could potentially affect customer acquisition, and whether it is a wise move depends on the company's goals and objectives.

3. Interview with sales/ marketing managers of B2B and B2C Organizations

Interviewer: Hello, thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. I'm interviewing to explore how sales and marketing managers in a business-to-business or business-to-customer organization understand the concept of a strategically significant customer. Can you tell me, in your own words, what you believe counts as a strategically significant customer?

Sales/Marketing Manager: Sure, I believe that a strategically significant customer is a customer who has a significant impact on the organization's revenue, profitability, and growth. This can include customers who make large purchases or have a long-term relationship with the organization.

Interviewer: That's a common understanding of a strategically significant customer. In the book Customer Relationship Management: Concepts and Technologies by Buttle and Maklan, the authors classify strategically significant customers based on their potential for revenue generation, profitability, and growth. Do you think this classification is consistent with your understanding of a strategically significant customer?

Sales/Marketing Manager: Yes, I think that the classification presented in the book is consistent with my understanding of a strategically significant customer. The potential for revenue generation, profitability, and growth are all important factors to consider when evaluating the strategic significance of a customer.
Interviewer: Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this topic. Do you have any other comments or insights on the concept of strategically significant customers that you'd like to share?

Sales/Marketing Manager: I think it's important to note that the definition of a strategically significant customer can vary depending on the organization and its specific goals and objectives. For example, an organization that is focused on long-term growth may place more emphasis on customers with the potential for future revenue and profitability, while an organization that is focused on short-term revenue may prioritize customers who make large, immediate purchases. It's also important to consider other factors, such as the level of customer loyalty and the potential for cross-selling and upselling.

The concepts discussed in the book related to the strategically significant were from the aspect of business values. According to the concepts discussed in the book, the strategically significant customers are quite valuable assets for the Organizations who must be preserved (Maklan, 2019). Furthermore, the observations made from the interview had revealed the aspects of revenue generation while defining the concept of a strategically significant Customer for an Organization. The perception of strategically significant Customer had also varied from Organization to Organization based on the Organizational priorities and needs.

4. Changes and improvements needed in the CRM process in the Organizations to address environmental disruptions

To address environmental disruptions such as the COVID-19 pandemic in the future, CRM processes should be adapted to incorporate more virtual interactions with customers. This can involve several key steps, including:

- Developing a virtual customer engagement strategy: This involves identifying the best channels and methods for engaging with customers virtually, such as using social media, video conferencing, or online chat. This strategy should be based on customer preferences and behaviors and should be designed to provide a seamless and convenient customer experience (Chi, 2021).

- Investing in technology and training: To effectively engage with customers virtually, organizations should invest in the necessary technology and tools, such as customer relationship management software and virtual collaboration tools (Chi, 2021). They should also provide training to employees to ensure that they can effectively use these tools and provide high-quality customer service.

- Personalizing the customer experience: In a virtual environment, it is important to provide personalized, relevant experiences to customers. This can involve using customer data and insights to tailor interactions and offers to individual customers, and providing a personalized and seamless experience across all channels (Chi, 2021).

For example, a retail company might use customer data to provide personalized product recommendations and offers to customers via email or social media. This could involve using machine learning algorithms to analyze customer purchase history and preferences, and providing personalized recommendations based on this data.

Furthermore, to effectively address environmental disruptions like the COVID-19 pandemic in the future, CRM processes should be adapted to incorporate more virtual interactions with customers. This can involve developing a virtual customer engagement strategy, investing in technology and training, and personalizing the customer experience.

III. Conclusion

The key differences between strategic, operational, and analytical CRM that are used in Organizations are the variations in the focus of the approaches towards different domains and techniques adopted to attain the end goals. Strategic CRM focuses on improving the overall business strategy, operational CRM focuses on managing daily customer interactions, and analytical CRM focuses on using analytics to make data-driven decisions.

Furthermore, during the outbreak of COVID-19, a transition to virtualized systems was adopted by Organizations to cope with the external disruptions due to which the adoption of social media platforms and other online platforms had increased. The modifications made in the CRM processes had helped to strengthen the relationship with the Customers, enhance the customer experience levels, and raise the lead conversion rates.

References list

BE462 International Human Resource Management Assignment Sample

Assignment Brief

You are expected to write an essay of no more than 2,000 words.
All submissions must be presented in typescript (MS Word format), 12pt, 1.5 line spacing.
Please read the additional notes below carefully.

Assignment Question

A company of your choice is looking into sending an employee to a foreign country.

Your company director is asking to prepare a cross-cultural support package for the employee. This plan should address the following information in a format of your choice:

Part A. The context (500-800 words)

- Identify Business Strategy and Needs (around 200 words)

- Your HR plan must be tied to the overall business plan. Hence you should start off by assessing the goals of your company.

- What will be the company’s goals and objectives for the expatriation?

- What is the nature of the expatriation?

- What will be the product and what is the potential size of the market?

- Is there a demand to justify the internationalisation strategy?

- Country Analysis (recommended word count = around 500 words)

• - Compare the general conditions of both countries (parent and host), including:
• - General values,
• - Political/legal/socio-economic situation
• - Social institutions
• - Standard of living
• - Physical environment

- Job analysis and Job description (recommended word count = around 100 words)

- What is the position required in the foreign country? What are the main skills and experience required to meet the company’s goals and objectives?

Part B. Expatriate’s Cross-cultural Support Package (around 1200-1500 words)

- What will the cross-cultural training involve (around 800 words)? Explain:
- In brief the content
- pedagogical approaches
- duration
- when they will be provided.

- What will the cross-cultural support involve (around 300 words)?
- Why is it important for your particular organisation, and in the particular country context (around 100 words)?

Learning outcomes targeted

Through this assignment students should be able to critically evaluate organisational change in relation to:

- Appraise how national institutional and cultural differences lead to differences in country specific HRM practices and underpin the differing perspectives on HRM

- Exercise judgement regarding the skills required by international managers for the management of cultural diversity.

- Analyse the impact of international businesses on their host countries&#39; systems and evaluate convergence or divergence in HRM practices and approaches.

- Critically review HRM practices in a range of countries, in relation to work and organisational design, employee resourcing, reward and benefit systems, the management of performance, and the professional development of different kinds of employees.

Solution

Introduction

The following study will focus on developing a plan which will aim at developing a package for cultural support in order to prepare an employee from Wesfarmers for a new foreign job location. The home country along with the host country’s analysis will be performed and a brief description of the cross-cultural training plan will also be provided.

Part A

Business Strategy and Needs

Objectives and goals and expatriation

- To support Wesfarmers overseas market-based commercial operations.
- To encourage transparent and ethical human resource development for organisational growth (Wesfarmers, 2022).
- To promote and sell a variety of items produced by Wesfarmers in the United Kingdom.

The above-mentioned objectives are required to enable cross-cultural management, and Wesfarmers' innovation assists them in growing their business from Australia to the United Kingdom market.

Nature of expatriation

The nature of expatriation can be referred to as the support that a company is given in order to conduct business organisation overseas with the same company. This includes the purpose, outcomes, activities during the expatriation process and other contextual factors (Shortland & Perkins, 2022). Given the dynamic changes that occur in every country, these factors may undergo modifications that present a number of obstacles to expatriates.
Company’s product and market size

Figure 1: Revenue graph of Wesfarmers
Source: (Statista, 2022)

The company that is forming the cross-cultural training plan is Wesfarmers and Wesfarmers is a conglomerate organisation. The company mainly deals with building materials, home improvements, technological products, outdoor living and many more (Wesfarmers, 2022). The market size of Wesfarmers in Australia is huge. The company generated a revenue of 30.8 billion and has over 107,000 employees and is the 441st most valuable organisation in the world.

Justification of expatriation strategy

Yes, there is a need for justifying the company’s internationalisation strategy since Wesfarmers operates internationally and every year the company transfers its employees to host countries (Kanstrén & Suutari, 2021). Hence, justifying the internationalisation strategy is important for best assignment help.

Country Analysis

Parent country: Australia

General values: The general values of Australia include fairness, respect, freedom and equal opportunity and maintaining peace, security and prosperity are also prime values of the country.

Political/socio-economic/legal situation: The political situation of Australia is quite stable and Queen Elizabeth the 2nd is the head of the country. The queen is only the head figure while all the main functions are performed by the state government and governor in-general (Coleborne & Dunk, 2022).
Australia is the world's 13th biggest economy. In the year 2017, the GDP increased by over 2% (Welfens & Baier, 2018).

The legal factors of the country include employment laws, regulatory bodies, industry laws, consumer protection laws and many more.

Social institutions: There are various social institutions present in the country such as the health system, education system, aged care system and political system.
Living standard: Australia is one of the countries that have a high living standard (Nguyen & Wang, 2019). There are various job opportunities, well-developed education infrastructure and financial services that help the people of the country live a standard life. Higher standards imply a higher salary and also a greater cost of living.

Physical environment: The physical environment of Australia mainly includes low-lying plateaus with desert, mountain ranges in the south-east and east, south-eastern fertile plains and rangelands.

Host country: United Kingdom

General values: The general values of the United Kingdom include rule of law, democracy, individual liberty, tolerance and respect.

Political/socio-economic/legal situation: The United Kingdom often faces political issues due to the Brexit issue and the aftermath of Brexit (Welfens & Baier, 2018). The businesses in the country are affected by Brexit and trade laws and employment laws in the country also politically affect the country.
The UK is the 20th largest per capita in the world. The business market of the country is also very diverse and it allows for the growth and development of businesses in the country. The GDP of the country is 2.2 trillion which is among the largest GDP in the world. The education and health care systems in the country are also well-developed which offers greater employment opportunities.

Social institutions: The social institutions of the United Kingdom include racecourses, cinemas, theatres, libraries, literary institutions and museums and art galleries (Lust & Rakner, 2018).

Living standard: The UK holds the sixteenth position in the index of quality of life. The infrastructure of the country is well-developed and the country is also a hub for multinational business organisations which provides great employment opportunities.

Physical environment: The physical environment of the United Kingdom includes low mountains and undeveloped hills, and rolling plains on the south-eastern and eastern sides of the country. The country also has a temperate type of climate.

Job analysis and Job description

Wesfarmers intends to relocate its staff to the United Kingdom in order to expand its operations in the business market of the United Kingdom (Wesfarmers, 2022). The employment post of Marketing Assistant and export sales is necessary for this reason.

The following description of talents and experience required to be an exceptional marketing assistant and export salesperson:

- Clear and fluent nonverbal and verbal communication skills.
- Well-developed knowledge and understanding of marketing tools and implementation.
- Teamwork management that is highly integrated and independence and flexibility of work.
- Excellent managerial skills with a thorough understanding of export operations.

Part B

Overview of the cross-cultural training
The cross-cultural training plan is developed in order to prepare the expatriate employee for his new job location in the United Kingdom as Marketing Assistant and Export sales. The plan provided below will help in understanding the entire plan in detail.

Brief overview

In order to develop a goal-oriented and successful training programme that maintains the principles of international HRM, the plan needs to be well-defined and strategic. The plan must provide effective cross-cultural training techniques that aim to enrich the employee’s language, communication and develop cross-cultural awareness (Shepherd, 2019). The plan should also focus on developing the employee’s knowledge regarding courtesy, etiquette and other aspects that will help the employee to better adjust himself to the new country. The following awareness and comprehensive knowledge of these factors are necessary for shaping the employee as the ideal employees for expatriates in the United Kingdom.

Figure 2: Cross-cultural training programme requirements
Source: (Pinterest, 2022)

The most basic prerequisite for employees to acclimate to their new country is a competent communication style. A thorough awareness of communication styles is also required for successful work in the host country.

Management style is critical for good corporate organisation, which is required for long-term growth (Heyes et al., 2020). In the host country, a competent management style offers employees a sense of belonging and expands their knowledge of the company's organisational procedures. During cross-cultural training, the employee must be made aware of the importance of understanding the management styles of the host country.

Monitoring and comprehending this style in the expiate employee will assist them in appropriately supervising notable leadership and management techniques in the new country. With the development of professional communication skills, the employee will be able to effectively work and adapt to the new surroundings (Vare et al., 2019). Effectiveness in communication and fluency in language will help in fostering quality teamwork and collaborative spirit in the employee.

Pedagogical approaches

In a globalisation era management team of the company must apply pedagogical approaches to creative beneficial cross-cultural training programmes for Wesfarmers employees who will be expatriated from the parent nation to the host country.

Behaviouralism: The behaviouralism theory can be applied in the training programme as it effectively describes the correct use of introduction-based and lecture-based learnings in order to effectively implement this training in the expatriate (Levinthal, 2018). The orientation training must be provided to the employee so that the employee can be prepared for the orientation process. The basic cross-cultural skills must be developed in the employee so that the language, non-verbal communication and the culture of the new country can be understood by the employee.

Liberationism: In this method, the employee must be placed at the heart of a democratic atmosphere where all values are combined to generate fresh concepts (El Ashmawi, Sanchez & Carmona, 2018). This method emphasises understanding of diversity, experimental activities, small- and large-group interactions, and theme-based content for Wesfarmers personnel throughout training.

Social Constructivism: This strategy is also used to establish major learning themes and ideas in the social and communal setting (Lombardo & Kantola, 2021). In the case of Wesfarmers, expatriate cross-cultural training is clearly a collaborative activity between the learner and assessors.

Constructivism: Employees will learn through their individual and practical experience, as well as reflection on their job, in this facet of training. It also includes training in unseen pedagogy, which trainees apply in a cross-cultural learning centre (Merve, 2019). Such a constructive approach is particularly productive for Wesfarmers personnel in the United Kingdom, and it aids in project work, critical business operations, and inquiry-based learning. A variety of approaches are included in this strategy for future learning.
Duration

Table 1: Duration of the training programme
Source: (Self-developed)

Deliverables

It is critical to demonstrate to management that cross-cultural knowledge training was completed successfully. This programme additionally promotes excellent outcomes by ensuring communication enablement and diverse cultural understanding.

Cross-cultural support

The training programme contains core cultural understandings as it is crucial for the proper management to set effective interaction between the working teams and the diverse group (Dambi et al., 2018). The company operates internationally and has good experience in preparing employees for a new job location. The company has provided cross-cultural support to various employees and has been quite successful in doing so. The company allows the employees to freely discuss issues that they feel might act as a barrier in the new country. The management team of the company focuses on identifying the aspects where the employee lacks and develops programs that aim to bridge that gap (Giorgi et al., 2020). This significant cross-cultural training programme also aims in developing the professional communication of the employee and enhancing the managerial skill of the employee as well. As a result of these sessions and training, a diverse group of people have the opportunity to collaborate with one another, which ultimately aids in their development. Furthermore, it has explored a variety of managerial methods in this regard. It is necessary for the aforementioned organisation to develop tactics for better implementing this management style.

Importance of cross-cultural training

Cross-cultural training is quite important as it helps in effectively preparing an employee for a new culture and a new job location where he will be promoted to (Setti, Sommovigo &Argentero, 2020). Cross-cultural training helps in developing cross-cultural awareness among employees which helps them easily adjust to a new culture. Multinational organisations often provide cross-cultural training to their employees so that they can have a better understanding of the country, its cultures, language, communication style, etiquette and many more aspects. Cross-cultural training also helps in developing the professional communication skills of the employees which benefits them in better networking with potential business partners. This training also helps employees in understanding the business market of the host country. This not only helps in developing market knowledge and market dynamics understandings, it also helps in the business of the country since the knowledge regarding the host country’s business market can be applied in the business expansion process (Kaihlanen, Hietapakka & Heponiemi, 2019). In addition to this, cross-cultural training also helps in professional development since employees who participate in this training get to know about a completely different business market and they can also develop their skills according to the requirements of business institutions in that specific country.

Conclusion

It can hence be concluded that with the help of this cross-cultural training plan, the expatriate employee will be able to develop cross-cultural awareness and it will also prepare him to get easily adapted to the new surroundings. The training programme will also be helpful in understanding the culture of the United Kingdom better which will also help the employee in mixing well with the new workforce in the United Kingdom.

Reference list

BE486 Organisational Behaviour and Human Resource Management Assignment Sample

Assignment Brief

Critically evaluate the following statement:

“At its best, performance management is a holistic set of processes. It brings together many principles that enable good people management practice, including learning and development, performance measurement and organisational development.” (CIPD, 2019).

Discuss relevant concepts and theory behind the statement. In your essay, you should cover themes and readings from this module on HRM, along with additional sources that you have researched independently.

The word count should be in the range of 2300 - 2500 words (excluding references).

Assessment criteria:

- Evidence of wide reading and use of learning resources
- The clarity of your understanding of relevant concepts
- Critical thinking and judgement
- Coherence in the discussion you develop
- The quality of the organisation and structure of your argument
- Effective use of language (clarity of expression)
- The correct use of referencing (APA or Harvard style).

Additional instructions:

- The essay should be word-processed and written in an appropriate academic style.
- The total word count (excluding references) must be in the range stated.
- You should base your work only on authoritative sources.

- You should ensure that you have fully acknowledged the work of others by using in-text citations (in the body of the text) and a full list of references at the end.
- The essay will be processed with plagiarism detection software.

Solution

Introduction

A management's performance may be managed by measures taken to guarantee that objectives are being reached in a timely, efficient, and productive way. The product or service itself, as well as the organization, department, and personnel performance that went into making it are all fair game for analysis. It's also the method through which an organization brings its assets and personnel in line with its most important goals and priorities. A successful business will have a performance management system in place. This report focuses on how performance management can help in training and learning and help in organizational development for assignment help.

Performance management

Even though performance assessment is central to performance management, the broader process encompasses all organizational policies, procedures, and design characteristics that interact to generate employee performance (Schleicher et al. 2019). This holistic viewpoint is representative of a configurational strategy to strategic hrm, which asserts that HR patterns, rather than isolated HR actions, are what's required to realize an organization's goals (Schleicher et al. 2018). Armstrong (2021) observes that the performance management process may serve as a platform for the synchronization of all HR policies and procedures. It has been demonstrated that for an organization's HR architecture to produce desired performance, HR activities must be "bundled" such that they complement and enhance each other (Aguinis, 2019). Mone & London (2018) propose that for performance management to be effective, all of its parts must be in sync with one another. Bundles of aligned HR practices form a virtuous cycle that drives the achievement of goals (Mahmoudimehr & Sebghati, 2019). Increased performance (task and contextual; Beeri et al. 2019) may be seen as a distant byproduct of performance management, yet it is the process' ultimate goal. Cognitive, emotional, and conative outcomes are examples of more proximal results that may be expected before any noticeable changes in performance. Dooren & Hoffmann (2018), for instance, discovered the connection between intrinsic motivation and self-reported performance when participants established developmental goals and received feedback on their progress. According to research by Schleicher et al. (2019), a worker's performance may be predicted by a collection of cognitive characteristics that influence how they react to feedback. It was discovered by Schleicher et al. (2018) that emotional commitment mediated the connection between the feedback context and citizenship behaviours (contextual performance). Therefore, in order to properly manage performance, it is necessary to attain outcomes that come before improved performance. The key to effective performance management, as pointed out by Aguinis (2019), is instilling in employees the drive and dedication they need to meet their goals. Creating these near-term results is a crucial part of performance management.

It was in 1968 when Edwin Locke first put out his idea of goal setting. Employees are more likely to go above and beyond the call of duty if they feel their efforts are valued and contribute to a greater whole, according to this hypothesis (Mone & London, 2018). This is the case because workers remain dedicated to their objectives. If they aren't able to achieve their goals, they will either perform harder or readjust their expectations. The objectives of the performance management system will have been achieved if performance levels actually rise.

Action steps are a crucial part of goal formulation. Strategies like this inspire and direct the workforce or group in the direction of success. The SMART criteria are one set of criteria that may be used to define objectives. S and M often stand for "specific" and "measurable." The most frequent iteration uses the remaining letters to stand for "attainable," "relevant," and "time-bound," respectively. Setting goals is an excellent way to boost staff productivity. The next paragraphs will cover Mahmoudimehr & Sebghati (2019) five main concepts of goal setting. When these concepts are utilized at a company's management level, productivity increases.

Clarity: A well-defined aim is more likely to be attained than a vague one. That is to say; intentions have to be very clear. When setting a goal, it's helpful to designate a date by which companies want to have it accomplished (Beeri et al. 2019). The worker should be aware of when his work must be finished. One of the benefits of this is that it aids in the successful completion of a certain project or mission. The difficulty of objective should be challenging. The staff will be encouraged to work harder toward the objective (Dooren & Hoffmann 2018). Given the difficulty of the objective, employees are more likely to use their initiative to come up with creative solutions. The person is motivated to do their very best in response to the challenge.

One must be committed to the task at hand in order to achieve success. When a goal is communicated to the team, everyone takes more responsibility for ensuring its success. When workers are committed to their job, they take responsibility for it. As a result, they will take more pride in their work and become more self-aware (Schleicher et al. 2019). It's important to have a system in place for reporting on how far they have come. Regular meetings might be set up to assess the situation and brainstorm solutions. If the end result is too challenging, it is best to make the objective less demanding. Feedbacks allow for this understanding to emerge (Schleicher et al. 2018). The evaluation process of an employee and his performance may be improved with the aid of feedback. Complicacy of the task: More time should be allotted to accomplish a more difficult objective. That is to say, even if achieving a goal seems impossible, effective training regimens may be devised.

Victor Vroom first introduced expectation theory in 1964. According to this school of thinking, workers will adjust their behaviour inside the organisation in such a way that they have the greatest possible opportunity of accomplishing the most significant and personally meaningful goals they have set for themselves (Aguinis, 2019). Companies modify their behaviour in ways that are most likely to bring about the results companies want. As it is widely held that present and future actions are intertwined, this notion forms the theoretical foundation of performance management. One's level of expectation is set by the degree to which one is certain that engaging in a particular behaviour will unquestionably lead to the desired outcome (Mone & London, 2018). As a result, this quality aids people in identifying whether or not they possess the necessary skill sets for successfully completing a task. However, motivation decreases in tandem with unattainable performance objectives.

The act of providing compensation in exchange for a specified performance result is linked to instrumentality. So, people are prompted to take on tasks whose completion would result in more benefits for themselves (Mahmoudimehr & Sebghati, 2019). When the reward or instrumentality for several organizational activities is the same, however, the incentive to do those performances wanes. The value of the reinforcement received by a person for displaying an ideal behaviour. People thus consider a number of factors when making judgments on the merit of their monetary benefits. There are a variety of factors at play, such as individuals' varying requirements, values, objectives, and drives. Motives for completing certain endeavours might also change depending on valence (Beeri et al. 2019). People prioritize the factor that has the biggest impact on their motivation while making decisions about how to act.

Almost every business model makes use of expectations theory in practice. Used in all facets of the employer-employee relationship, but especially for keeping tabs on how well workers are doing in their jobs (Dooren & Hoffmann 2018). Organizational procedures like hiring and staffing are examples of expectation theory's application. The same holds true for assessing employee performance in relation to organizational objectives and evaluating the efficacy of training programmes (Schleicher et al. 2019). However, this theory is also used to determine what factors inspire certain workers inside an organization. Motives for joining an organization may be broken down into three categories: needs, objectives, and prior experiences, and this theory can provide light on all three.

Performance Measurement

Measuring performance has emerged as a pressing concern in recent times. In today's fast-paced world, the capacity of an organization to assess its important operations, and this at all levels of the organization, is very crucial to the organization's success. Yet, the state of performance measuring research and its application remains inadequate. Performance metrics, for instance, are hardly connected to the organization's goals and long-term vision. Critical tasks are frequently not supported byMcDavid et al. (2018).

Existing measuring methods, including information from outside sources, are not taken into account. Such problems may be traced, at least in part, to the lack of a holistic, overarching paradigm (Nigri & Del Baldo, 2018). Only a few models have been developed in the literature, and most of them either lack sufficient depth or fail to take into account important factors.

Those in the know agree that it's crucial to evaluate performance regularly. The measuring operations in organizations have benefited greatly from the various guidelines and frameworks that have resulted from research over the last two decades (Kaydos, 2020). Early on, it was recognized that automating the processes of collecting, analyzing, and disseminating performance data was crucial. In 1985, for example, Globerson suggested incorporating performance data collection into regular business procedures. The use of information systems in performance evaluation has been emphasized by a number of writers, including Bacon (2023). Several commercial solutions to performance assessment have been presented by software editors recently, and a few research-based methods have also been proposed.

Recommendations for improving performance assessment often include taking indications of success back to their roots in organizational strategy and goals. Once the organization's overarching strategy is defined, it may be broken down into more specific goals for which suitable performance indicators can be selected (Islami et al. 2018). It is important to derive performance indicators from the organization's strategy and goals to make sure everyone is rowing in the same direction.

Therefore, sub-optimizations at the local level. However, modern performance measurement systems tend to place more emphasis on the indicators themselves and their aims than on the relationship between objectives and performance indicators (Rita et al. 2018). It's also uncommon for efforts meant to bolster the goals and boost performance to be directly tied to the targets and KPIs. However, as Kaplan and Norton point out, many organizations' actions are not always tied to the achievement of specific goals (Newman et al. 2020). Performance indicators should be able to be connected to goals and activities in a performance assessment system.

Training and Learning

Training in performance management is a programme through which workers may enhance their abilities and productivity on the job in tandem with their manager and the organization. Training in performance management is designed to accomplish two goals: first, it is meant to increase productivity right away. Second, it is meant to move participants ahead in their professions (Ismail et al. 2021). Traditional methods of performance management training, such as one-on-one meetings and annual reviews, are being phased out in favour of their digital counterparts as a growing number of firms put a greater priority on education and development.
Training, performance evaluation, and an employee's overall contribution to the business are all inextricably linked (Prentice et al. 2020). Management of employee performance may be enhanced via training. Employees get a sense of direction and purpose in their work by learning the standards by which their work is judged and, more crucially, the expectations of their superiors. Knowledge in the workplace is consolidated in this way (Armstrong & Landers, 2018). Customers and clients are only two of the groups who stand to benefit greatly from a company's investment in training. Training that emphasizes performance management may reduce attrition, boost productivity, improve service quality, and boost revenue.

Depending on the level of detail and personalization of a given training programme, different metrics will need to be used to evaluate its performance (Alduayj & Rajpoot, 2018). To keep tabs on how well their training is improving employee performance, they may use the metrics they already have in place. Create a starting point for new hires and employee longevity rates. Then they can track the progress of these indicators as they integrate more strategic training into the various phases of the employee life cycle (Marvin et al. 2021). Leverage measures like productivity, employee morale, and internal promotions as their training-enhanced quality management plan matures.

Deloitte claims that many companies' approaches to employee compensation and benefits are lagging behind the times because of the rise of new talent strategies. Presently, just 11% of respondents believe that their compensation structures are well correlated with the aims of their companies (Huang et al. 2022). Organizations should completely integrate performance management with training activities and match it with business objectives to shed performance management's image as a punishment and reward system. The success of an organization may be ensured by training programmes that aid the employees and through management that is based on measurable performance targets (Guan and Frenkel, 2018).

Organizational Development

When companies practise continuous performance management, they proactively cater to their development demands for professional development (Chanana, 2021). By often meeting to review employee performance, development possibilities, and individual development goals, they can maintain a culture of continuous improvement. Talent may be developed via tactics that not only reflect individual capabilities but also the direction of the firm, using data gleaned from interviews and an employee's previous performance and present efforts (Raffoni et al. 2018).

With a shared knowledge of their employees' abilities and an agile platform that enables them to often shift priorities and concentrate on new development areas, they can foster a setting in which they are encouraged to grow in a way that provides the most benefit to the company (Yavuz, 2020). Effective performance management reveals any obvious gaps in performance. It puts more pressure on both management and staff to raise performance levels. The report pinpoints weak spots in the company so they may be addressed (Roscoe et al. 2019). It aids the company in ensuring that quality, cost, safety, and the satisfaction of customers are always being enhanced.

The term performance management refers to the performance of using charts and graphs to keep tabs on how well a company is doing and to identify and address problems as they arise (Bellisario & Pavlov, 2018). To fulfil commitments to customers, workers, shareholders, and other stakeholders, a formal performance management system is essential in every business. Organizational development in achieving the organization's purpose and objectives may be enhanced by a concerted effort by management and staff members through a process known as performance management (Raffoni et al. 2018). It is the single most important factor in a company's development. The performance with which a company manages both its own and its workers' performance is a key factor in the organization's ultimate level of success.

Conclusion

Time is required for the performance management process, which includes both preparation and execution steps. Management and staff alike may benefit from the process's reduced workload. Most significantly, the process is a powerful motivator for both management and staff since it facilitates the realization of both individual and collective goals while also advancing the organization's mission. Systematically improving individual and leadership team communication is a key component of every successful performance management strategy. Employees are better equipped to express issues, handle difficulties, and propose solutions when dependable communication channels are able to be built. Improvements in both employee enthusiasm and output may be achieved via performance management. Employees that are invested in their job are more likely to remain, contribute more, and achieve greater success. Increased productivity and return on engagement may be achieved by increasing employee enthusiasm. 

References

MBA600 Capstone Strategy Assignment Sample

Your task

Individually, you are required to reflect on the learnings gained from undertaking the capstone subject and assessments by writing a 2500 word reflective essay.

Assessment Description

The purpose of this assessment is to foster students ability to coherently reflect on their undertaking of the Capstone: Strategy subject together with a reflection on their entire MBA.

Assessment Instructions

You are required to look back at their MBA course as a whole and identify the specific skills developed that will assist them in becoming effective practitioners in the workplace.

Learning is a persistent change in performance or potential that results from experience and interaction.

Reflective learning is the process of stepping back from the experience and reflecting on how skills, attitudes, mindset and behaviours have evolved.

Your reflective essay must cover the following:

• Introduction.
• A brief discussion on the value of relective practice for managers and leaders
• A personal reflection on learnings from the capstone subject and consultancy research process.
• A personal reflection on skills developed over the MBA.
• A personal reflection on how these will assist in future career endeavours.
• Conclusions.
• References.

The reflective essay should include discussion of learnings from both a theoretical and practical perspective. Additionally, insights from undertaking assessments and research, capstone lessons as well as group activities from this and other subjects over the duration of the course. Specific examples should be cited to support and justify all points.

Solution

Introduction

Reflective practice is learning from and through past experience and gaining insight for future improvement. Reflective practice is necessary for students pursuing higher studies. It is also necessary for business professionals like leaders and managers to identify personal skill, attitudes and potentials for future improvement of professional qualities. For Assignment Help, The present reflective study focuses on investigating idea gain from the capstone subject and from the consultancy research process. Evaluation of the importance of reflective practice to leaders and managers of the business have been discussed here. Reflection about skill development in MBA and identification of future career endeavours are necessary elements of this reflection report.

Reflective Practice for Managers and Leaders

Reflective practice acts as the gateway for the professional development of business professionals. It acts as the basic door for enhancement of professional skill, potential and attitudes. The way by which reflective practice add value to leaders and managers within business areas are as follows:

Identification of professional skill gap:

Reflective practice helps leaders as well as managers to recognize and identify the gaps where improvement is required. As opined by Miciak et al. (2021, p154), reflective practice makes people rethink their experiences. I think rethinking professional experiences by managers as well as leaders help them to identify the skill gap. In addition to this, with the aid of reflection, managers can evaluate strengths as well as weaknesses where improvement is required.

Development in professional skills:

As reflective practice is necessary to create personal strength and weakness of leaders and managers, it is the best tool for professional development (Tlali, 2019, p. 95). I think reflection makes people think about their lack of areas that help them to foster the development process. Rethinking and memorizing the incidence and experience allows managers as well as leaders to focus on the development of skill. I think skills that are usually developed by managers and leaders with the help of reflective practice are communication skill, time management skill, decision making skill, problem-solving skill, motivation skill and critical thinking skill.

Achievement of success in career:

Career success depends upon the capabilities of the leaders and managers to determine their skill gap and improvement of that gap area. As mentioned by Saric and Steph (2017, p.89), reflection is necessary to investigate the limitations and flaws in managing people and regulating the workforce’s demand. With the help of reflection, managers and leaders can become able to implement reflective thesaurus into the practical business handling situation. Development of skill, potentials and professional behaviour, in turn, helps to help them achieve success in their professional career also.

Better handling of the professional team:

Reflective practice helps to add value to leaders and managers for better handling of their workforces. According to Geeson (2017, p.8), reflection allows leaders and managers to explore their mentoring role and guide people to effective manners. I think handling a professional team requires focusing on multiple areas like motivation, team handling, conflict manager and decision making. Reflection allows us to rethink and replenish all the capabilities of managers and leaders and exert their efficacy to handle a team for organizational development after all.

Deep learning and self-empowerment:

Reflective practice has value on the self-empowerment of leaders and managers. I think self-empowerment is the first and foremost important professional attribute that allows leaders and managers to regulate and guide the activities of followers. As mentioned by Gardner et al. (2019, p27), Self-empowerment and self-efficacy are necessary to handle change in professional areas. Self-awareness adds value to leaders and managers regarding understanding oneself when compared to others. It also helps in better understanding others and the development of relationships in professional areas.

Figure 1: Value of reflective practice for managers and leaders
(Source: Possessed by author)

Reflection from Capstone Subject and Consultancy Research Process

From the overall capstone subject, different types of models and theories about the strategic management process of business I have learnt. SWOT analysis and have helped me to gain ideas about the importance of analysis of internal business environments. I have gained ideas about different models of environmental analysis for a business. I have identified that PESTLE analysis is usually carried out to identify external theta and opportunity of business organizations. As opined by Bruijl (2018, p.128), Porter's five force model is used to identify the competitive forces of business. It has given me the idea that the power of consumers, power of suppliers, rivalries, the threat of substitute and the development of substitute are the five most important factors that determine the competitive environment of a business. As reported by Verhoeven and Johnson (2017, p.37), analysis of product market strategy is the necessary element of the product configuration process. The capstone project gave me an idea about the product life cycle that, in turn, helped me in providing ideas about different stages in which a product goes. I have gained insight from the capstone project that the development of corporate agility depends upon the dynamic capabilities of a business organization. The Capstone project and consultancy research process have helped me to gain insight into the strategic planning process. As mentioned by Koch and Windsperger (2017, p.5), digital technology is used widely in business to gain a competitive advantage. In this regard, I have gained an idea from the capstone subject that there are basically three most important primary sources of competitive advantage for business at present. These are cost advantages, especially lower-cost strategy, resource and capabilities of business and differentiation benefits.

I have captured insight from the consultancy research process, and capstone subject that sensing, seizing and transforming are the most important tactics used for the achievement of corporate agility. I have gained the idea that The McKinsey 7S Model is used to identify the organizational effectiveness regarding the achievement of success. These 7S factors are skill, structure, style, system, staff, shared value and strategy. As mentioned by Indartono and Wibowo (2017, p.7275), the VRIO model is used for the identification of resources for businesses that provide competitive benefits. The Capstone project has given me the opportunity to explore the idea of isolating mechanisms. The Caption project gave me an idea about the importance of performance appraisal methods. The consultancy research process and capstone subject provide me with an idea of how well the leader's style matches a specific setting or situation under the contingency theory. According to Loo and Lau (2019), capital management is necessary for a business to identify the investment performance of the business. The Capstone project and consultancy process helped me to access ideas about the cash flow management and financial stability analysis of business organizations. It is necessary to share that I have gained ideas about the ratio analysis, working capital and funding required for the evaluation of financial analysis of the business.

Consultancy research pieces and capstone subjects have given me ideas about the business model of Professor David Teece. It is usually used by the business for the achievement of sustainability via the four most important stages. These stages are market segmentation, value proposition, capturing value from market segment and isolating mechanisms to hinder imitation and disintermediation. According to Keane et al. (2020, p.6), the business canvas model (BCM) is used by entrepreneurs to outline their future business. Capstone subject and consultancy research process gave me the opportunity to gain ideas about business canvas models that can help me in future to implement my business. I can say that the idea gained by me about the balance score is used to track the execution of activities by my staff within their control and to monitor the consequences arising from these actions in future. I have gained an idea about different types of matrices used to analyse organizational performance. These matrices are Salary Competitiveness Ratio (SCR), Employee Productivity Rate, the average time to hire, Customer Support Tickets, On-Time Rate, Overdue Project Percentage, Net Promoter Score, customer effort index, Customer Effort Score (CES) and Key Performance Indicator (KPI). I have also gained an idea about the organizational decision-making process. In the future, I will apply designing thinking in the organizational decision-making process.

I have identified that employee engagement is a necessary element for business. In order to motivate employers, a suitable leadership style needs to be implemented within the business process (Kempster et al. 2019, p.4). I have identified different forms of leadership style from the capstone subject like transformational leadership, transactional, servant, directing, consulting, participating and delegating style of leadership. The consultancy research process also made me aware of different types of change models like ADKAR change management, Kurt Lewin model of change and also about organizational culture. Ideas about primary research and secondary research can help me in the future to carry out a business project. I have gained insight into qualitative and quantitative research. As mentioned by Aspers and Corte (2019, p.140), qualitative research uses data that are non-countable in nature. At the same time, quantitative research uses data that are usually countable. Consultancy research also gave me ideas about the research design consisting of several stages like problem identification, identification of purpose, theoretical framework, hypothesis development, determination of research scope, determination of methodology and final outcome.

Reflection about skill development in MBA

Over the MBA course, I have developed lots of skills that can help me in the future for my professional career. I want to apply all those skills that I have developed in my future career profession so that I can access success. A skill that I developed over the MBA courses are as follows:

Critical thinking:

Throughout the MBA courses, I attend lots of formative and summative examinations. All these assessments have helped me to think critically about the answers to the specific assessment question. Hence, I can say that MBA courses have helped me to develop my critical thinking power, which I will apply in my professional career to identify solutions to specific issues.

Communication:

Communication is the most important transferable skill that a business professional must have (Guffey and Loewy, 2021, p.29). During MBA courses, I have constantly interacted with my mentor and peers. The interaction was both face to face, verbal and non-verbal. The continuous interaction has helped me to develop my core communication skill that I will apply to my future professional life to bring organizational consultancy.

Problem-solving:

This is the most important skill that I have ever learned from MBA courses. During the weekly assessment, the tutor gave me reasoning and problem-solving tasks. With the aid of creativity and critical thinking, I solved the issues. In some aspect, the tutor gave us a group project and allow me to handle conflict between team members. This process allows me to apply my critical thinking and communication to manage conflicts.

Figure 2: Different skill developed during MBA course
(Source: Possessed by author)

Time management skill:

Throughout the entire MBA course, I have gained skill regarding the time management process effectively. As mentioned by Hensley et al. (2018), time management is necessary for students to achieve success in their academic areas. Short formative tests each week are taken by our tutor in MBA courses that allow us to answer all within a short period of time. This aspect has helped me to develop my time management skill which I think will help me even in future to complete tasks within the deadline.

Team working skill:

Group projects are given by our tutor to identify our team working potentials. This aspect allows me to develop my team working skill as well as a leadership skill. As opined by Jones (2019, p.3), working efficiently in a team helps both students and professionals to achieve success. I think team working helped me to learn about the importance of relationship building. This idea gained from the MBA courses will be applied in my professional life so that I can be able to build suitable relationships with my followers as well as customers.

Research skill:

This is the most important skill that I have gained from the MBA course. Each and every assessment, I focused on researching lots of resources so that I can provide the actual answers to the question of my mentors. This aspect allows me to build my core research skill that I can apply in my future career for the achievement of professional success.

Reflection of Future Career Endeavours

Though I have gained lots of skill in my MBA courses, I still identified certain areas where I need improvement for my future career endeavours. These skill areas are mentioned below:

Table 1: Timeline for future career endeavours
(Source: Developed by author)

Analysis

I can say that I have small insights about leadership skills, time management skills, decision-making skills and verbal communication skills. Though my MBA courses were effective enough to develop all four skills, I still think I still require improvement in all these four areas. I need to improve my leadership skills so that I can guide people in the future, especially in my professional areas. As opined by Guffey and Loewy (2021, p. 23), communication is a necessary skill in the business area to manage any conflict and bring clarity to the operation process. I need improvement in the verbal communication process only so that I can understand the needs and requirements of others as well. I need to improve my time management skill so that I can complete a business project task in future. I think the improvement of decision-making skill is required to make vital decisions regarding business processes. Hence, all four skills will help me in the future to become the successful professional I want to be.

Conclusion

From the overall discussion, it can be concluded that reflective practice also acts as the basic step for the professional development of leaders and managers. From the consultancy research process, I have gained lots of ideas about the type of research, types of data and data collection method. It has also given me ideas about the data interpretation process. I have gained insight into different types of models from the entire capstone subject. These are the SWOT model, PESTLE model, porter's five forces, resource-based view, McKinsey 7S Model, business canvas, balanced scorecard, BCG matrix and the idea of financial management in business. From MBA courses, I have also gained certain forms of skills like time management, critical thinking, decision making, team working, problem solving and communication skills. I have identified certain areas where I needed improvement in future to become a successful professional. The skills that require improvement are leadership skills, time management skills, decision-making skills and verbal communication skills.

Reference list

D31VR Value and Risk Management Essay Sample

Value and Risk Management of Conference and Community Centre project

Value Management at RIBA Stage 1

The client is considering commissioning a VM study at RIBA Stage 1 and has approached your consultancy for advice. Present a study proposal which

- Explains the benefits of a study at this stage

- Presents a proposed agenda for the workshop study

- Identifies the workshop participants who should be in attendance for an effective study Value Engineering the design at RIBA Stage 4.

The client has requested a cost saving VE proposal which saves a minimum 2% of the budget.

Present a VE proposal which identifies the element(s) affected and explains the impact on functionality (NB detailed costings are not required)

Risk Management Report The client decided to implement your cost saving Value Engineering proposal you recommended above. Considering you are the project manager for the project at the construction stage, carry out a risk assessment for the execution of the proposed option at construction stage and present it in the form of a short report and risk register. Your report should include risk mitigation proposals.

NB This next part is not related to the case study scenario

Risk Management Essay

Prepare a short essay which evaluates the construction industry contribution- in a country of your choosing- to the climate emergency. Your essay should argue how the industry should help manage the risks presented by climate change in the coming years.

The essay should cite references which support your arguments. Indicative word count for the essay is 1500 words, excluding the list of references.

You may wish to think about the following when preparing your essay. (These are pointers and not intended to be prescriptive. You may choose to concentrate on particular issues here or advance your own.

Solution

Importance of Value Management at Designing Stage

Quarry House Conference and Community Centre have developed their design and planning of the construction and therefore after processing the overall planning and construction, proper value management is necessary to evaluate various details related to the construction site.

Value management basically incorporates with series of interviews, workshops, and reviews, through which, project requirements are evaluated and achieved. The approach for value management depends on the route chosen for the acquisition, but it is generally a technique which useful to any construction project. For Assignment Help, The design of the Quarry House Conference and Community Centre construction and its details of measurements, equipment, and purpose already have been made, and now it is time to evaluate the VE properly (Zhang, Van and Leeflang 2014). It is important for that part of the project, which is viewed on a whole life basis, such as private finances initiative schemes.

Any construction project should only be projected after a proper value management process is done. Many projects use to suffer from poor management and failure due to lack of value management. These facts can include cost and time, excessive operation cost, user dissatisfaction, usage of tools, etc. value management can help to minimize these kinds of risks in construction projects.

The analysis of needs is much more than compiling a wish list of possible requirements. It needs a consensus from all the stakeholders to identify and objectify the needs and identify the weight of the relative value of the project.

It is a structured approach that shows, the establishment of the value which means to the client. Clearly, agreeing and defining the project objectives and establishing the best objective that can be achieved. Value management incorporates value engineering and it is a systematic approach to deliver the required function to determine the whole cist, reliability of the project, and performance (Zhang, Van and Leeflang 2014).

Here is the question, that when value management is is required. In this project Quarry House Conference and Community Centre, value management is needed to evaluate its success rate and risks involved in the project. As the basic planning and design of the project are completed, the Value management will evaluate its risk factors and evaluate the budget to identify the requirements of the project and objectives to achieve.

This is a systematic technique that depends in a project’s overall cost and risks involved in the project. For “strategic critical projects” a full value management procedure is always justified (high risk- high value). For “strategic security”, high-risk and low-value project, and “tactical profit”, low risk and high value, value management depends on the inputs stakeholders. However, for “tactical acquisition”, low-risk- low value, projects, value management is not that necessary (Vignesh, Priya and Gayathri 2018).

Here are the primary benefits of value management in the Quarry House Conference and Community Centre project.

• It will help to optimize the different balance of value between different stakeholders

• It will clearly define the mean of value to the owner and users

• It will help to develop the business according to the business needs

• It will make a clear picture of the project brief that will include the expectations of sponsors, and their priorities. Along with that, it will improve the communication between all the stakeholders related to the project (Vignesh, Priya and Gayathri 2018).

Propose Agenda for Workshop Program

This is a discussion phase, where the individuals will grow up a concrete view on possible outcomes regarding the project. The workshop will help to gain an idea on proper communication, secured and privacy in facilities in the construction and provide proper communication among the participants. Tere is a three days’ workshop agenda proposed and prep[ared for implementation (Saleh et al., 2017).

The implementation stage is the final stage of VM and it will compile formal plans at the end of the workshop. Tools and techniques used for the workshop are listed below.

Document analysis: this is the beginning of the workshop and it will be used in evaluating the aims and topics of the workshop. It will contain a document so that the value manager can understand the recent factors regarding the project and develop ideas according to it (Saleh et al., 2017).

ACID test or Authority consult inform and Do: this technique will be used in the diagnostic and orientation stage of the workshop in order to select the viewable participants to participate in the Value management workshop (Saleh et al., 2017).

Presentation: this will be conducted during the workshop to permit individuals to relate their opinions about the project.

Workshop Agenda 1

The three days’ workshop agenda is mentioned below.

Day 1

Learning outcomes

• Participants brainstorming about their individual roles and duties
• Developing an idea on the project overview
• Familiarity with the site by visiting
• Mutual interaction
• Positive thinking and reconstruction
• Business effectiveness to drive the profit
• A basic clear idea on the project (Saleh et al., 2017)

Day 2

Learning outcomes

• Understanding the stakeholders’ needs and demands.
• Best practice observation for community hub project development
• Innovation on individual ideas
• Turning the proposed project
• Create clarification, suggestions, and best options for the project development (Fletche and Satchwell 2019)

Day 3

Learning outcomes

• Days outlines for effective outcomes

• The community project will be considered as the most realistic, and essential findings for stakeholders
• Reviewing the high costing raw materials and replace with valuable sustainable materials to maximize the profit

• Mutual interaction

• the design will go through many changes and it will provide the most effective solution and measures for the value management of this project

• Set of question will clarify and promotes the best solutions

• The viable recommendation will be offered and adopted Workshop participants

For these three days of the workshop, the participation list is given below.

1. Client representative
2. Local community representative
3. Designer team
4. Environmental representative
5. Construction manager
6. Management team
7. Construction team

Workshop agenda 2

The two days’ workshop is left for the key participants who will gain a concrete element of the community hub projects related to execution and construction. The two days agenda is mentioned below.

Learning outcomes

• Outlining the project requirements
• Project evaluation
• The rationale for design choice
• Mutual interaction
• Effective understanding of the case
• Evaluation of different functional components and proposal for the community project

Learning outcomes

• Re-evaluation of the components
• Basic technical understanding of the project
• Mutual interaction and understanding
• Suggestion for any constructive improvements
• Implementation process discussion
• recommendation

Workshop participants

• VRM consultant
• Project manager
• Service engineer
• Contractors
• designers

Risk Management Integration of all RIBA stages

RIBA stage 1: business justification

RIBA stage 1: understanding the best process assessment route

RIBA stage 2, 3,4: design processing stage

RIBA stage 5: physical project construction (Mohamad, and Coffey 2010)

Value Engineering the design at RIBA Stage 4

Introduction

The proposal has been made in this section so as to decrease the budget by 2% in the construction of Quarry House Conference and Community Centre. There has been study of the proposed methods from the perspective of decreasing the material used as well as changing some of the building structure.
VE Proposal identifying the elements affected and impact on functionality

The Value Engineering (VE) proposal has been made so that the Quarry House Conference and Community Centre can be developed with a 2% less budget than the proposed one. Value Engineering is done so that the cost be saved along with maintaining the time and quality scope of the construction project (CooperandSlagmulder, 2017). It has been observed that with help of Value Engineering (VE), it is possible that the construction project is done with a reduced budget as it applies system thinking process to engineer buildings with reduced cost (Park,2017). In this case, there are certain elements identified which can be nullified or modified in actual implementation process so that the budget gets reduced and functionality does not change. This has been represented in the following manner:

In the first instance, there is proposal regarding removal of lobbies on the lower ground floors. It has been observed that with help of such process, the cost will go down and hence, the element identified in this case is that of lobbies which does not serve as foyers. It can be easily eliminated without must change in the building functionality (Park, 2017). Building functionality would have change if the strength of the overall building decreases. In the second instance, there is the proposal of replacement of spiral stair with L-shaped one. There is not much change in the building functionality other than the style of the staircase will be less. The benefit that one obtains from such style change is the reduction in cost. In making spiral shaped staircase, there is more cost incurred as more raw materials such as cement, bricks are required. L-shaped stairs are considered to be more cost-effective to be developed. Thus, the element identified in this case is the spiral shaped staircase.

The curved balcony is proposed to be changed and made into a cantilevered one. This is required to ensure that the cost goes down as the raw materials required in making curved ones are more. There will be no change in the functionality as the strength of the building does not get altered. There is always an effort made to reduce the labour pay within construction work wherever possible as per Value Engineering principle (VE) (Peurifoyet al., 2018). This has been maintained in the proposed method as there would be less requirement of labour in manufacturing the linear balcony. VE also looks forward in having a construction design in which the building can be developed with less raw materials. It is possible to be achieved when certain unnecessary parts get reduced and is not need to be constructed (Fewingsand & Henjewele, 2019). The balcony area at the back is one such proposition which can be made use of as it will decrease the construction time period. It will decrease the overall cost required in making the balcony.

The window size needs to be reduced so that the less cost is incurred in buying the material. The elements identified in this case is that of the frame required in making the windows and it will lead to the reduction of cost. The window size gets reduced and also will not the functionality of having light getting passed through. There is always an effort to substitute products in VE so that less cost can be given in developing the overall project. It has been observed that asphalt has been the material that will be selected in making the roofs instead of the timber shingles. Asphalt costs less and hence, it makes the project budget efficient (Barbosa, Woetzeland Mischke, 2017). There is also another proposition made in installing LED lights and solar panels. In the long-run, the solar panel will be helpful in reducing the cost as no non-renewable energy sources have to be used. It will help in decreasing the electricity bills, however, at the time of installation the cost is high. CAPEX or additional cost will increase for the project.

Laminated Veneer Lumberslide material will be used and is the element identified to replace bamboo. The Laminated Veneer Lumberwill be more cost-effective and there will be increase in functionality as the metal slides are more durable. There is also an effort made through Value Engineering to increase the functionality. There is requirement identified of covering the cut through slab. The functionality will go high as the increase in usable space will be obtained. This will make the cost to go down. There has been proposal made of using pre-cast concrete in place of normal concrete walls. The functionality will go high along with reduction of the cost. It has been identified that the pre-cast walls are less costly and also reduces the required time in doing construction work.

Prestressed concrete has been proposed to be replaced with the reinforced ones and it will make the cost to go down. It has been estimated to improve the functionality as the prestressed concrete is 23% less cost-effective. MS Steel stairs will be replacing the RC Stairs as per the identified proposal and it will increase the functionality as the steel material do not corrode. The cost will also go down through this process. There has been VE incurred in using recycled glass for partition instead of other forms. It will bring down the cost and also give the aesthetics to the building to be developed.

Conclusion

From the study done, it can be concluded that there has been proposed techniques according to which some of the additional spaces or structures have been decided to be nullified. It has been done with the estimation that less labour and material cost will be used. There is also replacement of some of the materials with more cost-effective ones so that overall project budget decreases.

Risk Management Report

Introduction

Our enterprise risk management is discussed in depth in the risk management report. The danger information in this section may not even be complete. Forward-looking comments may well be made throughout the conversation. Our company is subject to the risk and risks that could cause actual result differs significantly from those projected in the forward statements. Readers are encouraged to review our governmental filings for a more detailed description of risk factors and disclosures, as well as to use their own judgement when assessing the Firm's risks. The technique of combining managerial tools and procedures to get out in front of a process is known as value management. Furthermore, value engineering assists in achieving greater advantages while minimising project costs and risks. Value management, on the other hand, can be used to demonstrate careful planning, analysis, and progress of a building project in this scenario. The activities in our Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) systems include detecting, analysing, assessing, treating, reducing, and monitoring strategy, functional, legal, and regulatory risks to the fulfilment of our primary business objectives. ERM attempts to mitigate the negative effects of these risks, allowing businesses to effectively harness market expansion and maintain its competitive advantage for the long term. A number of threats can jeopardise the achievement of a certain company objective. Likewise, a single risk could have a major influence on numerous company objectives. Risk management is concerned with identifying threats and devising measures to mitigate them. This is accomplished through regular meetings of the Club's risk and strategic committee. Value management can be seen of as a team-based method to providing benefits to a building project. It can be seen that value management takes into account the client's goals and objectives when planning a project. However, the major purpose and goal of value management in projects is to ensure that the best value is achieved for the research project.

Key Components of the Risk Management Framework

Risk reporting is a means for demonstrating the benefit that the Risk paying for basic to an organisation. It provides proactive risk mitigation by helping organisations to recognise and obsessing as they arise before or they appear evident, enabling them to handle corporate governance in a proactive manner. Effective risk accounting must focus on the effect of risk measures on individual enterprises and corporate risk assessments. It also ensures that risk management is embedded in leadership, decision-making, monitoring, and business processes. Focuses on outliers and analyses their root causes thoroughly. Uses retrospective outcomes to learn from and anticipate business issues before they arise. Gives regulators, management, and boards of directors certainty. Promotes continual development by providing transparency about exposures - by highlighting areas of concern within the organisation. Furthermore, maximum benefits can be realised early in the project. Value engineering, on the other hand, makes it impossible to simply introduce processes into project activity. Furthermore, by using a value management approach, suitable solutions towards the identified challenges in the building project activity can be achieved. We see this dynamic landscape as an excellent opportunity for businesses to rethink how the game has been played in the past. We've partnered with cutting-edge companies in a variety of industries to help them rethink their compliance and risk management strategies. Risk reporting is at the vanguard of these efforts, as it is often a disregarded component of Risk Management, with several organisations monitoring their key business activities using retrospective indicators, disjointed systems, and expensive information processes.Value management, on either hand, does not allow for straightforward implementation of processes in project work. Furthermore, by using a value management approach, correct solutions to recognised challenges in building company work can be achieved.

During the lifecycle of our service, we may be required to process Special Category Data given by you or other users of our service. Special category data includes information about a person's racial or cultural origins, political beliefs, moral or religious beliefs, party affiliation, genetic data, biometric information, health data, sex life, and sexual preference. In some extremely restricted cases, we may additionally process data relating to criminal and/or civil offences, as well as child data, and you will be notified if we need to gather this data from you. Only sensitive data will be collected if it is necessary for the fulfilment of the services for which we have been hired. The data subjects' basic rights are always considered to guarantee that the processing is fair, transparent, and legitimate.

Description Risk Management

It is necessary to identify the workshop participants who must be present in order for the project's information or signal to be received. This entails identifying the individuals who are critical to the conference center's construction. This is where the project's supporting client comes in. He must be present, together with officials from other administrative bodies, in order for the proposal to be debated in front of them. Their participation also aids the program manager in discussing the project's financial requirements and proposing project in-scope deliverable. Risk management is the process of identifying, assessing, and controlling hazards to a company's capital and profitability. Economic turbulence, legal obligations, technological obstacles, strategic management failures, catastrophes, and natural catastrophes are all possible sources of risk. Unforeseen events or circumstances that, if they occur, have a positive or negative impact on the project's objectives. The key element of this concept is that, if ambiguity develops, the impact on the planned endeavor's goals might be either positive or bad.. Under the legal basis of 'performance of the contract,' we handle information in order to maintain and preserve our actual or prospective contractual relationships. Personal data may be processed in order to just provide various client support services, accept payments, and enhance our website. We keep track of all calls made to our employees, whether they are internal, inbound, or outbound. Our 'legitimate interests' are the legal basis on which we frequently treat data for the length of maintenance on your accounts and for the decision to enter an initial or succeeding contract. This includes ensuring that our administration and IT systems are safe and resistant to unwanted access.

An organization's risk management process aims to identify, assess, monitor, and control the risks it confronts. Complexity breeds danger in the business world. Business executives face numerous decisions, limited resources, conflicting interests, and environmental considerations to weigh. Ecological, political, business, economic, and other dangers confront businesses.The goal of risk management is to determine which risks a company confronts, assess and quantify those risks, devise means to monitor hazards, and lastly devise treatment procedures that mitigate or reduce hazards. The main goal is to develop a business that is less vulnerable to risks, hence increasing the security of investors. The next phase in risk management objectives is risk measurement. Once the hazards are identified, it is necessary to develop a system for measuring and quantifying the risks' potential impact. The received confirmation standard, ISO 31000 on Risk Management, has been updated. The risk register is a document that is used to measure risk values in financial terms and determine the risk's likelihood of occurrence. Let's stick with the crop farmer as an example. The likelihood of drought or floods is determined by prior weather patterns, while the impact is determined by the crop's susceptibility to the circumstances. These details would be recorded in a risk register, which would provide our farmer with a summary of the degree of risk associated with each variables as well as the value - at - risk (the quantity that may be lost if the variable were to fail.

The next risk management goal to achieve is to constantly monitor hazards after we have both monitored the risks that exist in a business. Risks are not constant; in actuality, the likelihood of risk things happening changes with time. Weather-related dangers are a wonderful example of this for our farmer. The weather department would have supplied an assessment on the climate that would prevail throughout the farming period at the proposal stage and planting. It is typical for the department to keep people informed about projected weather patterns because it is extremely difficult to predict climate effectively, especially over extended periods of time.

Conclusion

The study indicated that there is a need to develop project briefing sessions, which is why the workshop programme was held. According to the findings of the study, there are numerous advantages to conducting a value management study and implementing value engineering principles into a building project. This is one of the reasons why the cost of completing a project is frequently lowered. It is necessary to arrange a workshop where project team members can be briefed on team objectives and building deliverables of the project. It is critical to ensure that the client and funders are present in the workshops so that they can get a sense of the cost of the project that has been determined as well as the natural resources that will be present in the team. It is necessary to comprehend project deliverables and communicate them to team members such that they may have a grasp of the project. As a result, having project members on the workshop attendee team list is critical. It has been seen that the building project has become more innovative as a result of their contributions (Janani, Chakravarthy, and Raj, 2018). It has been noticed that suppliers must attend the meeting and workshops in order to gain a better grasp of the raw resources necessary for the construction of the building. The head of the construction team, as well as the architect, are among the key stakeholders invited to attend the session.

Risk Management Essay

Introduction

Risk management is the term that developed during the 20th century, to maintain future uncertainty in a business field. It is a consistent, logical, and disciplined approach to face future uncertainty in the business (Klochkova, and Koltsova 2017).

In the world, there are multiple reasons that are causing climate changing and climate change is affecting our daily life, environment, development, and many more things. Climate charging has a devastating effect on the environment and atmosphere that is creating a huge problem in the world (Ripple et al., 2021). The United States is a powerful country in all sectors, from economy to industry development. However, in climate emergency situations, the US is ranked second in carbon emission in 2018, and this country is more focused on maintaining the situation. This paper will discuss about different aspects of risk management in the construction industry in US, the factor that creates the most risk for any business and development is climate change. In the construction industry, climate change and emergency are big troubles and it is affecting the whole environment and economics globally (Klochkova, and Koltsova 2017).

Climate Emergency

The climate emergency list includes China, the United States, India, Russia, and Japan. Among them, the United States ranked second and, in a report, it has been found that it is the second-largest CO2 emitter in the world. It approximately produced 5.41 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide in a year.
US industry of construction has reported 23% of greenhouse gas production in the year. The vital reason for climate change is greenhouse gas. Along with industrial effects, transportation, electricity production, agriculture, commercial and residential usage, etc are the reason for greenhouse gas and climate change. However, the construction industry is hugely responsible for the climate emergency situation in the US.

Contribution of construction industry in a climate emergency

The covid crises shifted the issues of climate emergency but climate chase and biodiversity are still a big issue in the world. Globally we just only left with 10 years to halve the carbon dioxide emission. in a report, it has been found that the construction industry is 37% responsible for this situation.

In recent years, the construction industry is already taking a lead role in controlling the climate emergency situation (Mavi, and Standing 2018). The World green building council already issued Net Zero caron building commitments that challenge many companies, industry and infrastructures along with countries ad states. They have decided to build net-zero carbon buildings by 2030 and promised to make all the buildings to be net-zero carbon by 2050.

A number of US construction industries declared this climate and biodiversity issues as an emergency situation. Manu engineers, constructors, architectures, and big companies developed to be part of the emission carbon goal; however, contractors did not collaboratively declare the contribution yet. The industry has taken various steps to handle this climate emergency situation.

To encourage sustainable behaviors and commitments to achieve the goals that have been made, the construction industry made various declarations, and such are mentioned below.

• Sustainable Working Practice and Material

There is a number of methods and materials that helps to achieve more sustainable development in the construction industry. This includes life cycle costing, post-occupancy evaluation, whole-life carbon is the basic scope to reduce both the operational and embodied resource use. Along with that, there are many sustainable raw materials and technology available to reduce carbon emissions (Mavi, and Standing 2018). Research development for more sustainability

There are many changes occurring in the sustainable industry, and there are many new products are launching to promote sustainable construction, therefore, many contractors build their own research team to identify the best suitable products for the construction business. As an example, the cement manufacturer in the US is 8% responsible for overall CO2 emission, therefore the cement manufactured lived a new way to reduce the emission, and that technology required proper research to achieve the goal (Mavi, and Standing 2018).

Digital tools, complex modeling, extensive databases are also used to optimize the algorithms of building performance and it delivers clearer pictures of the sustainability of building construction and performance.

• Raising awareness

Many of the participants in this US construction industry have pledged to raise awareness on sustainability and its importance to controlling biodiversity and climate emergency situation (Gills and Morgan 2021). These actions are taken by designers, developers, investors, funders, contractors, and supply chains. Along with promoting this awareness, the government has also taken various steps to make this plan successful.

• Rise of ESG

Public awareness of climate change includes the growing understating of climate change and its effect on the economical state. Thus, is created ESG or environmental, social, and government consideration to ride up the corporate agendas within US(Gills and Morgan 2021).

Risk management of construction industry in a climate emergency

Risk management supports any organization to decide the proper course of action to minimize the occurrence and effects of any risk on the business. In order to achieve excellent performance and productivity in a company, a firm must train their employees in such ways that, they can recognize any risks and take necessary steps to prevent them to affect the productivity, business and the organization (Klochkova, and Koltsova 2017). In addition, Climate emergency is a situation that affected almost all industry and the construction industry is affected the most. As climate emergency is a situation that needs to be handled with lots of awareness ad changes, it created various issues in the construction industry. Sustainable development projects are not easy to project (Zou, Kiviniemi and Jones 2017). Though, it is needed to control the climate changing situation. Some risks in the construction industry related to sustainability are,

• Technical risks

Sustainable development requires new technology and design to establish green buildings and reduce biodiversity. These technologies are not risk-free to handle, as many of the construction areas are not supportive to install new technologies, which is creating big issues in development. The whole industry needs to shift from traditional infrastructure to sustainable infrastructure (Zou, Kiviniemi and Jones 2017). This shifting is not that easy to present as there are many internal factors that are not yet supported for the changes.

• Environmental risks

The shifting of technologies and infrastructure can harm the environment as well. New plantation of systems and techniques are also sometimes responsible for producing greenhouse gas, especially for fuels and energy consumption, creating thus issues. Hence, sustainable development is good for the environment but the shifting is not that suitable for it (Amirshenava and Osanloo 2018).

• Financial risks

Sustainable development needs a big amount of money; however, the development is cost-effective, but the construction procedure is not economically free and hence, it requires more financial development that may cause risk in the financial status of the industry.
Along with that, there are risks in management, labor, training, and many more. However, the construction industry is acknowledging new risk management policies to overcome the risk factors in the future (Amirshenava and Osanloo 2018).

• Labor training

To overcome the risk factors, it is important to provide the best possible training to laborers and workers to make them regularly with the new infrastructure (Zou, Kiviniemi and Jones 2017). It will reduce the risk of accidents, and technical risks.

• Investigation and monitoring

Regular monitoring of the project development and investigation in the market can reduce the financial risk ad cut the budget of developing new sustainable infrastructure.

• Build awareness in the field

Creating awareness among the field workers and associates aware of the sustainable construction and climate emergency can involve more potential workers ad this can reduce the management risks in developing the construction and reach the goal (Gills and Morgan 2021).

• Technical support

Here is much technical development that can handle the environmental risk in the construction area. This technical support must be developed to arrange the shifting of tools and techniques easily (Zou, Kiviniemi and Jones 2017).

Managing Risks

Technology has been one of the promising factors to manage several risks within construction industry of US. Thus, AI driven insights can help the managers in handling risks which includes budget overrun, deadline overrun or any other issues which can be costlier for both the environment and in commercial sector. Use of sensors and installation management further helps to monitor safety and design errors, hence alert to the users is given within few seconds. Big data within construction industry will help in mitigating risks pertaining to people, environment and organization. Additionally, the construction industry in US must comply ISO certifications and process which has been developed in detail and embedding on nature & size of commercial sectors. Hence aspects of working procedure within ISO clearly mentions mitigation of risks from initiation stage till the completion one.

Conclusion

It can be concluded that Risk management is teamwork and it is important to overcome future challenges in any business or organization. Climate change and emergency is the biggest problem in the US after Covid, so the industries must be aware to hold their production and resume in a proper environmentally friendly way (Amirshenava and Osanloo 2018).  

Reference List

HCCSSD101 Case Management and Understanding Community Services Sample

Assessment Task

Reflect on and discuss the importance of the four key principles underlying the code of ethics of case management (Case Management Society of Australia and New Zealand’s National Code of Ethics for Case Management (2013) or ACWA Code of Ethics and Practice (2017) to the development and delivery of community services. Under what circumstances may it be necessary to limit the application of the principle of autonomy and how might you compensate for this? Use examples toillustrate your analysis.

Please refer to the Instructions for details on how to complete this task.

Instructions

1. To complete this assessment task, address the following questions in your 1,500-word (+/- 10%) essay and provide examples as required:

• What are the four key principles underpinning professional community service practice?

• How are these articulated in codes of ethics?

• Why are they important to informing practice?

2. Choose an example where, in working in the role of a case manager, you are attempting to develop a case management plan with a person who has limited understanding of the process (i.e., this may be due to reduced cognitive and decision-making capacity, confusion brought about due to a mental illness or impairment, or due to language and cultural issues which may result in the person finding the experience of this engagement intimidating and alienating):

• Use your example to explore the challenges this situation contains.

• How may you continue to operate in ways which respect client autonomy.

What strategies or adjustments to your practice will you need to engage in to achieve this?

• One way of reflecting on their importance may be to reflect on and analyse the implications of their absence in the relationship between a client and a service.

The structure of your essay should include:

• A separate cover page with the subject name and code, your name, the assessment number and title, and your Learning Facilitator’s name.

• Introduction (approximately 250 words) which contains a clear statement of the purpose of the essay and what you will cover, together with any relevant background information.

• The Main Body (approximately 1,000 words) which should contain identification of issues and their disassembly into parts and critical perspective to be applied in analysing the constituent parts.

• Conclusion (approximately 250 words) which summarises the key points of your essay.

Solution

Introduction

Ethical principles play a fundamental role in professional practice, serving as a foundational basis that establishes a moral framework to direct professionals in their engagements with clients and communities. Ethical decision-making and conduct within the realm of community service practice are significantly influenced by four fundamental principles: beneficence, nonmaleficence, justice, and autonomy. The aim of this essay is to thoroughly examine these principles and their importance in guiding professional community service practice. For Assignment Help, This essay covers a comprehensive description and analysis of the four fundamental principles that underlie professional community service practice, namely beneficence, nonmaleficence, justice, and autonomy. Every principle is thoroughly examined, providing a comprehensive explanation of its meaning, importance, and applicability to practical situations. The essay elucidated the manner in which these principles are expressed in codes of ethics, furnishing professionals with a lucid framework of directives and benchmarks for ethical behaviour.

Moreover, the essay covers concrete illustrations and situations in which professionals face difficulties in implementing these principles, such as when dealing with individuals who possess restricted comprehension or decision-making capabilities. This study examines the strategies and adjustments made in practice to ensure the preservation of client autonomy and rights during the case management process.

Main Body

There are four key principles underpinning professional community service practice such as beneficence, nonmaleficence, justice, and autonomy. Professionalism in many disciplines, including community service, is grounded in the ethical principles of beneficence, nonmaleficence, justice, and autonomy (Moore, 2016).

The idea of beneficence stresses the significance of enhancing people's and societies' well-being and welfare. It mandates that service providers put their customers' needs first and work to enhance their quality of life and the likelihood of a successful result. Practising professionally in a way that tries to have good outcomes and promote a feeling of caring and support is an example of beneficence (Tost et al. 2015). In community service, Volunteers in the community work to help those in need, whether they are members of disadvantaged groups or those with special circumstances. The concept of beneficence directs professionals to promote the welfare of their communities by facilitating access to healthcare, education, social services, and community development projects (Moore, 2016).

The concept of nonmaleficence, sometimes known as "do no harm," stresses the need to protect service receivers from any potential pain or distress (Della Croce, 2023). It necessitates that those in the field be alert to possible dangers and take the required safety measures to avoid injury. In community service, Professionals doing community service have a responsibility to avoid making matters worse by introducing unanticipated complications. To do so successfully requires careful evaluation, awareness of cultural norms, and cooperation with customers and communities (In K. Crinall & L. Berends, n.d.)

Fairness, equality, and reasonable distribution of goods and services are all central to justice. It stresses respecting all people and groups without bias or prejudice (Rahimzadeh et al. 2022). Community service professionals are responsible for fighting for social justice by identifying and addressing systematic injustices (Martin et al. 2018).

Autonomy allows people to make their judgements and choices without interference from others (Susser et al. 2019). This guiding concept acknowledges the importance of autonomy and individual choice. In community service, autonomy entails giving people and groups a say in the decisions that impact them (Martin et al. 2018).

These four principles are important because they provide a firm ethical foundation and guarantee that professionals operate honestly and decently. By sticking to these guidelines, professionals earn the confidence of their clients and the respect of their communities. Individuals are more inclined to actively participate and work with specialists they trust, improving the quality of services given (Qalati et al. 2021). The significance of these concepts in informing practice is strengthened when they are included in codes of ethics. Codes of ethics lay forth explicit principles and standards for conduct to ensure uniformity and responsibility among professionals in a certain industry. Ethics codes serve to remind professionals of their ethical obligations and to assist them in prioritising ethical issues in their day-to-day work by defining the principles of beneficence, nonmaleficence, justice, and autonomy (Beauchamp & Childress, 2009).

In community service sectors, including social work, counselling, and healthcare, the values of beneficence, nonmaleficence, justice, and autonomy are stated in codes of ethics (Acwa.org.au, 2023). The idea of beneficence, espoused in professional codes of ethics, requires service providers to put their customers' interests ahead of their own (Tost et al. 2015). Guidelines for delivering high-quality treatment, improving outcomes, and showing compassion and empathy might all be part of such a document. Professional ethics codes also encourage practitioners to actively look for ways to improve the lives of their clients and the communities in which they work (Beauchamp & Childress, 2009).

The idea of nonmaleficence is enshrined in ethical codes when it is clear that professionals are responsible for putting their patients' or customers' health and safety first (Della Croce, 2023). It might contain recommendations for minimising risk, evaluating possible hazards, and taking appropriate safety measures. The notion of justice, as outlined in ethical codes, calls for professionals to ensure that all people and communities have the same opportunities to benefit from their work (Rahimzadeh et al. 2022). Making sure the most vulnerable people in society get the help they need requires fighting for structural changes, removing obstacles, and raising awareness about existing ones. The dedication to getting informed permission from those receiving services, maintaining confidentiality, and recognising cultural and individual diversity in decision-making are all examples of how autonomy is expressed in codes of ethics (Beauchamp & Childress, 2009).

The following list is the most important principle to consider when deciding whether to buy a home. Professionals are obligated to put the needs of their customers and communities first and work tirelessly to improve their situation. The principle of nonmaleficence emphasises doing no damage to those receiving care and taking all reasonable measures to keep them safe (Della Croce, 2023). Justice promotes justice and equity by resolving inequities within the system. When people are given the freedom to make their own choices, it is called autonomy (Susser et al. 2019). These guidelines give a moral compass, patient-centred treatment, risk reduction strategies, and an emphasis on good results. They ensure moral behaviour and beneficial effects on persons who receive community service by guiding decision-making, increasing responsibility, and encouraging continual development in practice (Moore, 2016).

For example, an individual I'm dealing with as a case manager has a poor comprehension of the case management process owing to cognitive impairment. This person has difficulty understanding and making choices about their care, which makes the engagement process daunting and perplexing.

The key problem here is respecting the individual's right to autonomy and self-determination as part of the case management process (Susser et al. 2019). It's critical to get their input before making any choices on their behalf. In addition, it is hard to grasp the individual's preferences and wants due to language and cultural limitations, which further alienate the person and impede effective communication.

Several tactics and adaptations to my practice will use to ensure that the client's autonomy is respected at all times. I will start by making an effort to put myself in the other person's shoes by learning as much as I can about their history, values, and preferred methods of expression. To overcome language hurdles and facilitate clear communication, I will work in tandem with interpreters or cultural liaisons. Involving the person's loved ones or support system is another way I plan to learn more about the individual's priorities and priorities.

I will use clear language and visual aids to clarify difficult material and boost understanding in order to produce a case management plan that respects the client's autonomy. If it takes numerous sessions, I will make sure that the individual has enough opportunity to voice their opinions and preferences in order to facilitate meaningful involvement in the decision-making process. During these discussions, it is crucial to be patient, empathic, and attentive so that the other person feels heard and respected.

If the values of autonomy and beneficence aren't followed in this relationship, the other person may feel disempowered and cut out of the decision-making process (Susser et al. 2019). A less efficient case management strategy results if their requirements and preferences are not properly considered. In their absence, trust and communication between the client and the service break down, which in turn increases the risk of the customer not following the plan or dropping out of the service completely.

Conclusion

The essay identified that the four guiding principles of professional practice—beneficence, nonmaleficence, justice, and autonomy—are crucial ethical notions that educate and drive community service professionals in their relationships with clients and communities. To ensure that professional practice is founded on integrity, compassion, and respect for human rights, these principles serve as a moral compass and provide a framework for ethical decision-making and behaviour.

It mentioned that the idea of beneficence encourages professionals to actively pursue good results and enhance the quality of life for the people they serve, putting the needs of their clients first. Together, nonmaleficence and beneficence encourage practitioners to avoid damage and take steps to avoid unintended outcomes. Justice places an emphasis on justice and equality, putting pressure on professionals to combat inequalities in society and fight for the rights of marginalised groups. By definition, practitioners must respect their clients' right to self-determination by giving them a voice in, and ultimately benefiting from their decisions.
The value of these concepts is reaffirmed in practice by the codes of ethics that codify them in the form of explicit norms and standards. A solid ethical basis is provided by codes of ethics, which guarantee uniformity, accountability, and adherence to professional norms in all areas of community service practice.

References