The purpose of this summative assessment is to assess your written skills in both an academic and business context. It will also provide you with the opportunity to demonstrate relevant professional skills that employers will expect to see from potential employees.
You are required to produce an individual report, based on the framework you developed as Formative 2 Task, to analyse a current operations and quality management issue facing an organization / company using your knowledge and understanding of operations and quality management processes, tools and techniques and suggest improvement options that are relevant and appropriate to the evidence presented with a recommendation on how the issue should be addressed.
Your target audience will be senior management personnel of the organization / company. Within your report, they will want to see evidence of current research, both industries related as well as relevant academic research from academic credible sources.
The organization / company you choose is not one that you have used within previous summative assessments, nor an issue you have previously investigated, for any other Level 4 or 5 assessments.
Your report will need to:
• Present operations and quality management information and research in a professional manner using a range of credible sources.
• Provide background Information to your chosen sector and organization / company.
• Identify and evaluate the application of appropriate operations and quality management theory and best practice in different business contexts by clearly identifying current operations and quality management challenge(s) facing the organization’s / company’s sector.
• Apply an understanding of the scope and purpose of operations and quality management theory in practical business situations and organizations by clearly identifying your chosen operations and / or quality management challenge (a real issue or potential issue), supported by industry and academic research into issue.
• Demonstrate an understanding of the approaches for managing quality and the application of continuous improvement within organizations, by developing and evaluating options to provide recommendations on how operations and quality management issues can be resolved and provide analysis on judging the success of these.
Assessment Supporting Information You will be required to:
• Investigate and research additional information to that covered in lectures and seminars to make practical recommendations and demonstrate application of relevant concepts and theories.
• Identify an issue that is substantive enough (i.e. a major operational issue) for you to research and make credible and relevant recommendations about.
You will be expected to:
• Provide evidence from a range of credible sources.
• Make use of the formative assessment opportunities provided during the seminars through the completion of case study exercises, presentations, draft online submissions etc.
• Produce your own work, i.e. you cannot submit work that is the same as other students or those that you may be working with for other assessments. If you do so, then any such work will be subject to our academic misconduct guidelines and procedures.
• Write in the 3rd person.
• Cite your sources within the report as well as at the end (in the Harvard method of referencing).
