Assignment Brief
As part of the formal assessment for the Diploma in Strategic Management and Leadership programme you are required to submit an assignment for each module. Please refer to your Student Handbook for full details of the programme assessment scheme and general information on preparing and submitting assignments.
After completing the module you should be able to:
1: Understand the role of operations management in an organisation
2: Understand the importance of managing quality in an organisation
3: Be able to plan a strategic change in an organisation
4: Be able to implement a strategic quality change in an organisation
5: Be able to evaluate the outcomes of a strategic quality change in an organisation
Assignment Task
You are a co-Director of a small clothing manufacturer in Hong Kong, producing high quality women's clothing which is sold to independent designer stores in major cities within China. You have a small team of machinists working on exclusive designs which your in-house designer develops for each upcoming season. Currently, quality procedures are informal and what is deemed to be acceptable with regards to quality, left to individual machinists and their team leader to determine. Recently, there has been an increase in the number of returns for faulty products whilst imported clothing from abroad of improving quality has been squeezing your profit margins and challenging your turnover.
Your partner and you have decided that since there are likely to be further factors impacting on the marketplace both now and in the foreseeable future and that given your management training, you should undertake a full environmental analysis and make proposals regarding the organisations future strategic direction. Because this is being written for yourself and your business partner, an informal report is required. You do not need to undertake extensive research into the women's clothing sector where you live and / or work but do look at the environment generally and consider what the key issues are likely to be.
Task 1
a) With reference to your hypothetical organisation, explain the importance of effective operations management in achieving organisational objectives and consider, with reference to the literature and the case study, how you can evaluate the success of operations management processes in meeting overall organisational strategic objectives.
b) Quality can be defined as "a distinctive attribute or characteristic possessed by someone or something" (Oxford English Dictionary online, 2011). With reference to the same case study, explain why quality management is important and how quality is likely to be managed. There is clearly an issue with quality within the organisation, with reference to the literature and the case study consider how you can evaluate the effectiveness of quality management processes in meeting organisational objectives?
Task 2
Identify an improvement (strategic quality change) that could be made to improve quality performance.
a) Outline a plan to as to how this improvement can be achieved. You might want to give consideration to:
- The organisational objectives that the change would help meet
- Current and proposed systems / process / technology
- Strategic Objectives
- Targets to be achieved
- Physical and Human Resources required
- The effect of the change to stakeholders and steps needed to be taken to manage this
- Evaluation of change
- Training required
- How the effectiveness of the change will be evaluated
- How you would monitor the implementation of the change
b) With consideration to change management best practices, explain how you would implement this change and embed a quality culture to ensure continuous improvement.
Task 3
Explain how you would evaluate the outcomes of this change against likely organizational objectives and prior performance.