S1. Assessment 1 – Individual proposal: a case based proposal for improvement
1. An ability to select and use appropriate tools for analysis of different operations
and project management contexts.
2. Evaluation of practice to construct appropriate recommendations for
improvement.
3. Critical analysis of different approaches to project and operation managements.
This is a chance to practice making a difference in an organisation and involves a submitting a report on a case of your
choosing. It must propose an improvement to operations in a real organisation. It will be graded on its Practicality,
Performance and Persuasiveness. See the assignment brief below for details of the assignment and marking criteria:
The Basics
• Submit a written proposal
• This will propose an operational improvement for a real organisation
• You have to use Operations Management tools
• Make it compelling
The Brief
A lot of Operations and Project Management is about making things better; finding better ways to deliver the same
products, or finding ways of making products better.
An important skill within industry is being able to identify operations improvements and then propose those
improvements in the right way. The “right way” is the way that encourages people to understand and adopt your ideas.
This is a chance for you to develop that skill.
Your brief is to make things better; propose an improvement in the operations management of an organisation. It can
make things cheaper, quicker, improved, more flexible or dependable. It can involve goods, services or both. It can be
an organisation you work for, you have worked for, you have seen or even one you have researched out of interest.
The vital thing is you need to have sufficient information to do the following:
• Find a problem or an opportunity for improvement.
• Use appropriate Operations and Project Management tools to develop your proposal. Analyse what is
happening, what is needed and what could be better. Use the tools to show how things can be improved.
• Develop your proposal into a complete plan; what should be done, why, how and when.
• Present it well;
1. Create a written proposal that includes all of the relevant details that you need to clearly explain what you are
recommending.
2. Create a clear summary to help inform readers to be enthusiastic about your proposal; a summary should make
a reader interested about the topic and explain the key parts of the proposal.
Your work
• You should include a brief outline of your chosen organisation and the products/services to which your initiative
relates.
• You should present your initiative for change, describing what, how, why and when it could be implemented.
• You will support your initiative using analysis including operations and project management tools.
• You will need some data and you will need to explain how you gathered it, what assumptions you have made
and any other data you would like before implementation. (more details provided within lectures).
Guidelines
• A reminder of a standard report format is provided via Minerva. I believe a summary is critical as it gives people
a way into the report but for this assignment there is no fixed structure.
• To score higher marks I am looking for you to use your judgement to structure your proposal so that it is
compelling reading.
• There is a limit of 2,500 words equivalent but only write up to this limit if you have valuable content.
• There is no penalty for short proposals and well-written more concise proposals are likely to gain more marks for
persuasion.
• Use appendices for extra information.
References and Structure
● Your assignment should be Harvard Referenced and show a range of sources. This includes all data used
throughout.
● Please ensure that you structure your report appropriately and check your use of spelling, grammar and
punctuation throughout.
