Percentage of Module Grade: 60%
Objectives of the Assessment:
The aims of this module are to:
· To enhance students’ knowledge of concepts, frameworks and techniques employed in
analysing and designing modern organizations.
· To understand how firms adapt to the external environment and coordinate the activities
of different groups inside the firm to help enhance a given firm’s competitive advantage.
· To examine concepts and constructs such as organizational learning, population ecology,
formal vs. Informal organizations as a means to build a higher understanding of the new
organization forms and theories.
This project seeks to assess your understanding of these issues, and others covered over the term,
your ability to apply models and theories in a business context and your ability to critically
evaluate the performance of your chosen company in relation to these issues.
The key to success in this assessment is to use critical reflective skills to research, analyse and
evaluate the theories and issues.You must support the paper with specific academic text and
journal references in the critical discussion.
Project Description:
This is an individual project.
Your task:
Select an organisation of your choice, critically describe and evaluate its current organisational
structure and then suggest a suitable adaptation to improve its performance.
The adaptation might be to flatten it, make it more customer focused, nimble, networked, cost efficient, or any combination of these or another significant performance improvement that you identify.
Project Guidelines:
You should include the following headings in your project report:
1. Critical evaluation of the organisation;
2. The restructuring options
3. The restructuring plan
4. The action & control plan
Aspects that may be covered under each heading have been identified below, but these are not intended to exclude other issues you may consider relevant.
i) Critical evaluation of the organisation.
Aspects that may be covered include (though not exclusively):
• Business strategy (use Porter’s generic strategy framework) and the type of control strategy
the organisation uses (bureaucratic, market and clan).
• The policies the company uses to guarantee that its organization will meet its growth objectives.
• The strategic bottlenecks or operational impediments, including management style and technology, to the organisation’s development.
• Whether there has been an evolution in the organisation structure and processes in recent
years.
• Whether these changes were intended or occurred by default. Have any changes been successful or have they faltered? If successful, is a new structure and culture needed to ensure
future success?
ii) The restructuring options:
Summarise and conclude the evaluation in a SWOT setting out the strengths and weaknesses in
the organisation’s structure, culture, and people resources, assessing the restructuring options, and
defining new organisation structure possibilities and directions.
Consider (though not exclusively) whether:
• There are Strategic Business Units (SBUs) that could be operated independently from the
rest of the enterprise or whether new ones should be set up.
• There is something the company should do better from the organization standpoint to serve a
wider array of market segments?
• Virtual teams or alliances would be relevant in future?
iii) The restructuring plan should set out (though not exclusively):
• The objectives for the restructure.
• The general course that the organisation will follow in the near future.
• Improvements to the existing organisation in order to improve performance and the nature
of the restructure – cost reduction, operational improvement, service improvement and any
related changes to management style and skills.
• Any concomitant changes to the organisation’s strategic vision, business philosophy, use of
technology and alliances.
• Any related and complementary changes to employment policies including remuneration and
rewards.
• Whether to drop (divest) any current SBUs, which ones to develop further, and which new
ones to start.
• The type of control strategy the organisation will use (bureaucratic, market and clan)
iv) The Action & Control Plan
In this part formulate actions to concretise the restructuring:
Set out:
• A milestone action plan indicating who will be responsible for the respective actions to be
undertaken in the implementation of the restructuring plan, and when these actions will be
undertaken.
• A framework to monitor and control (measure) that the restructuring plan is being implemented to required time, quality and cost standards and its goals achieved.
Structure of the Project:
· Cover Page
· Table of Contents
· Introduction: including brief introduction to the company (not included in the word count).
· Body of the Report:
1. Critical evaluation of the organisation
2. The restructuring options
3. The restructuring plan
4. The action & control plan
· Conclusions
· Bibliography and citations
NOTE: The cover page should include the name of the course, the title of the project, the
student’s full name, the tutor’s name and the date. The table of contents should include all
the headings with appropriate page numbers, including the Bibliography and the
Appendices.
Formatting of the Report:
• The project should be prepared as a neatly typed Word document (Times New Roman 12, or
Arial 10 points), with double spacing and page numbering.
• The project is expected to be approximately 3,000 words in length +/-10% (not counting
tables or inserts, introduction and conclusions).
• All sources must be referenced in the text and a full bibliography must be provided
(including visited websites) in the Harvard style.
Deadline: Midnight April 17th 2016
Projects must be delivered by email to the lecturer and the academic office, and be loaded on
Turnitin by midnight on April 17th 2016. Only when this has been done will the project be
considered submitted. Late submission will carry a penalty of 10% per day (for example after
one day: grade x 90%, two days grade x 80% etc.)
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