Assessments 2a and 2b are connected. In this set of Assessments you are an HR manager who has been asked to re-design the HR strategy for an organis

Assessments 2a and 2b are connected. In this set of Assessments you are an HR manager who has been asked to re-design the HR strategy for an organisation. Your task is to:

identify an appropriate set of business and HR strategies that will better achieve the organisation's goals, given the external context;

identify appropriate HR practices that will enable the business to fully implement its business and HR strategies.

Choosing an organisation

Choose an organisation that you have knowledge of, or interest in. Make sure it is an organisation where you can get useful information, preferably from first hand sources. You may wish to interview the HR manager of the organisation responsible for managing HR issues at a strategic level, for greater insight into the issues faced by the organisation. Please note: your task is to make an independent assessment of the needs of the organisation. You are NOT to report on current practice or current plans within the organisation.

Quite often students make their task more difficult by selecting organisations that are too large, too complicated or too distant, or for which there is too little available information. Examples of organisations that are too big, too complicated, or too distant from you include Woolworths, Telstra, Optus, Qantas, General Motors, Nokia, Apple. Sometimes students choose organisations that are too distantnot in only in geography, but in useful, independent information about the organisationand leave them reliant on organisational websites, press releases or newspaper articles about the business. If you work for an organisation in a managerial role, however, you probably will be able to obtain sufficient information.

Often students, especially HR practitioners who work in the organisation they are using for this exercise, struggle to make an independent assessment of the organisation. As a result, their assignments tend to repeat existing policy or be limited to current thinking within the organisation. This is not encouraged. One of the purposes of this exercise is to prompt you to think as an independent professional.

Sometimes students look at businesses for which there is too little to analysefor example, analysing small retail stores, which are part of major chains, who are caught within major national business strategies, have no money to change anything and have already worked out the most efficient way to do business. One consequence of such approaches is that you will be limited in your scope to analyse the business. As a result, these assignments are hard to write, harder to read, and tend to be the weakest submitted and receive the lowest marks.

Assessment Part A

Assignment Criteria

Your PowerPoint presentation will be assessed on your ability to:

analyse the external environment of the organisation

propose a business strategy

recognise the organisations HR-related strengths and weaknesses

propose an HR strategy

use concepts learned in the course

communicate clearly

Assessment Instructions

Specifically, you will need to develop an HR strategy that adequately supports the business strategy for the organisation that you have chosen. This business strategy will be based on your assessment of the external context of the organisation and the organisation's goals. You will need to provide an assessment of the organisations external context, the opportunities and threats faced by the organisation, propose a business strategy, identify the organisations HR strengths and weaknesses, and then propose a HR strategy.

The audience is the organisations board of directors.

The Assessment 2a framework document puts in diagrammatic form the steps you need to complete. If you have followed the content of weeks 1, 2 and 3 you will see the sequence, partly because each week will focus on an aspect of this model.

Key issues to address in your slides:

Does the presentation contain details about the external environment of the organisation? Is the STEEPLED analysis coherent? Are the main opportunities and threats explicitly identified?

Is there a clear statement of business strategy? Is there a clear logic for the business strategy?

Is there a clear recognition of the organisations HR-related strengths and weaknesses in being able to implement the business strategy?

Is there a clear statement of HR strategy? Is there a clear logic for the HR strategy? How well does it support the business strategy given the strengths and weakness analysis?

Is the presentation organised in a coherent manner?

You will not need an executive summary because the document is so short.

No minimum number of references is required. However, if you draw on the argument or the evidence of someone else you are obliged to acknowledge the source.

When you reference, use the UniSA APA7 referencing style. These references should provide evidence for your assertions and must be selected from reputable academic sources such as peer-reviewed journal articles, textbooks and research books. You may wish to refer to the course readings , but do not rely on these alone. Make sure that most of the references are from other sources.

Prepare a PowerPoint presentation

Assessment 2a should be submitted electronically using Gradebook.

Assessment Advice and Resources

This presentation will be no longer than 15 slides, not including the cover page that contains your name and student ID, and a page(s) that contains reference details.

A PowerPoint presentation of 15 pages will be deemed to meet the word requirement for this assignment.

You only need to submit the PowerPoint slides. You do not need to make an in-person or recorded presentation.

A PowerPoint template is provided to guide the development of your presentation.

The paper How leading companies build the workforces they need to stay ahead presents the model on which Assessment 2a is based in a different way. It provides examples from industry, explaining how companies when faced by external challenges (STEEPLED) figure out what those changes mean for the organisation (OT), how they work out a business response (business strategy), how they work out if they have the skills etc to deal with it (strengths and weakness analysis), and how they develop a HR strategy to remedy the deficiencies.

Assessment Part B

Assessment Description

Your written report for Assessment 2b is a 2,000 word document. It includes the HR practicesthe operational HR activitiesneeded to implement the HR strategy.You will be providing an analysis that ranges from an assessment of your organisations external environment through to the specific HR practices that the organisation needs to implement the business and HR strategies.

You are required to explainin clear sentencesthe arguments (or a version of the argument) you submitted in Assessment 2a, extended to include the HR practices needed to fully implement the business and HR strategy.

Assignment Criteria

Your report will be assessed on your ability to:

analyse the external environment of the organisation

develop a business strategy

identify the strengths and weaknesses of an organisation

develop an HR strategy

explain and justify HR policies and practices

explain concepts covered in the course

communicate effectively.

Assessment Instructions

What is HR policy and practice? It is the actual operational HR activity. It is what converts the planthe strategyinto reality. It is what the HR practitioners spending their day doing. It is the actual set of activities and processes that the business uses.

In this assessment you need to specify what your chosen organisation needs to do to convert the HR strategy into actual activity. This will require you to draw on your previous studies, your experience, the content of this course, and your own reading.

You need to develop a clear argument that links your organisation's response to its environment to its set of HR practices.

Your first step is to undertake an evaluation of the context that surrounds the organisation. This will help you to identify a set of opportunities and threats, some of which may inform the organisations business strategy.

You need to make clear a business strategy that outlines how the organisation will achieve its goals, given the overall environment.

Does the organisation have the HR ability, skills and practices to actually implement the HR part of the business strategy? The strengths and weakness analysis will examine whether the organisation has the HR attributes needed to implement the business strategy. The HR strategy sketches what the organisation needs to do to ensure that HR fully supports the business strategy. The HR practices spell out how the HR strategy will be implemented.

You need to clarify the relationships between all of these stages. Usually students skim over the relationship between the STEEPLED analysis and the business strategy, as well as the relationship between the business strategy, the strengths and weakness analysis and the HR strategy. Make these relationships clear.

You will also need to spend some time explaining how the HR policies and practices could be/should be set up to achieve the organisations business strategy. The strongest papers will include all of this.

Write a report.

Assessment Advice and Resources

Use headings if you need to. Make it easy for the reader to read.

Use appendices if you need to report the PESTEL, OT or SW analyses.

If your paper has lots of tables and figures that make you go over the word limit you can move the tables and figures to the appendices. Just refer to it in the paper, so the marker knows where to look.