Assignment Brief

Use company in Hong Kong or China

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:

Be able to develop a project specification launch

Be able to plan for the launch of a new product, service or process

Be able to implement a project

Be able to evaluate the outcomes of a project

Be able to present the outcomes of a project

Assignment Task

For this assignment you are asked to consider an improvement project that you have been involved with / are familiar with within a workplace situation.

This could include introducing new procedures; consider new approaches to work tasks, purchase of new equipment / updating of equipment or new product / service development. It does not need to be a major project but it is important that the project has concluded / will conclude during your study of this module.

The project does not need to be a large project, but it does need to have contributed to enabling the organisation to meet its strategic objectives. Remember the definition or a project is that it is a unique event; it is temporary in that it has a start and a finish and is focused on a specific deliverable.

It may be repeated but not within exactly the same context. This assignment asks you to consider how you would design, plan and improvement that project yourself given your learning from the module. You are not being asked to advise how this happened rather how you would approach the project.

Identify an improvement project which is required / is underway and prepare a formal report for the project sponsor which covers the following:

Task 1 Project Need

Briefly describe an organization and a strategic project in the organization within 100 words.

Analyse the internal and external factors that can lead to a project being required including the factors which can lead to a project being required including the factors which have led to your highlighted project being needed.

Task 2 Project Specification

a) With reference to your example project identified above, prepare a project specification. You might find using an appropriate pro-forma useful in this part of your assignment.

b) Briefly, evaluate the importance of having a project specification highlighting what it should include and why.

Task 3 Produce a Project Plan

a) Based upon your specification above, prepare a detailed project plan. Consider what the plan would need to include in order to secure approval for implementation by senior management including:

- Resource requirements by resource type and when required
- Budget
- Timescales for the various stages of implementation. This should include an appropriate Gantt chart or CPA
- Implementation strategy
You may find using an appropriate pro-forma helpful for this part of your assignment. You can use Open Project, Microsoft Project, Excel or other appropriate software for detailing the tasks, resources, costs and timescale if you wish.

b) Evaluate why planning is key to successful project implementation

Task 4 Implement a Project

With reference to your project, advisehow you would implement this project and why including:
- Who would need to be involved and how they would be organised - Project Team Structure
- Systems and documents that may be needed / need to be implemented
- Monitoring progress against plan in terms of cost, quality and time and evaluation of the tools that you could use to assist you with this
- Change control

Task 5 Evaluating Project Outcomes

a) Evaluate your project giving regard to
- The project procedures used
- The outcomes of the project against the original project specification
- Make recommendations for further projects / investigations as appropriate with regards to procedure and process

b) You have been asked to present your project findings to the senior management team at a meeting and so you need to prepare a presentation of Task 5's findings.