BUS30032 Business Consulting Project Assignment 1

Subject Code & Title :-  BUS30032 Business Consulting Project
Assessment :-  Assignment 1
Group or Individual task :- Individual
Value (%) :- 25%
Associated Unit Learning Outcomes (ULO’s) :-
1. Apply business management principles concepts and theories using problem-solving techniques together with
Design Thinking tools to analyse a business problem.
2. Demonstrate the ability to formulate and justify innovative plans/recommendations for achieving the client’s project goals.
BUS30032 Business Consulting Project Assignment 1

Purpose of the assessment: 

This assessment aims to equip the students with problem analysis skills needed before embarking on ideating solutions to a given problem.

Students are expected to conduct a thorough problem analysis uncovering the nature of the problem the affected parties and their characteristics and the causes and effects of the problem.

These tasks develop a deeper level of empathy around the given problem and enable the students to take another individual’s organisation’s perspective. This is an essential skill and a professional capability that is built on open-mindedness and removes cognitive biases reducing blind spots in decision-making.

This assignment further requires students to develop a project development plan identifying project goals activities competencies challenges and measures of success.

Working on a client’s project necessitates the team members to under stand non-technical requirements such as project goals and individual roles within the project and build confidence that the project activities will deliver a solution addressing the problem in addition to the technical requirements as they are crucial for a project’s success.

Please see the next page for specific and detailed information on the assessment task.

BUS30032 Business Consulting Project Assignment 1

Detailed assignment instructions:
You are required to conduct a problem analysis by answering the following questions. To ensure the rigor in this analysis, you are required to use relevant frameworks/models/tools discussed in Weeks 1-4 of this unit appropriately:

Prepare a report covering the following tasks from (a) to (c).

(a) What is the problem your client wants you to address, who is affected by this problem and what can you say about the level of impact on each party affected by the problem?
Briefly explain the nature of the problem. Then identify the parties affected by the problem with the relative level of impact. You may want to categorise the affected parties if you see that there are multiple groups impacted by the problem (e.g., directly and indirectly affected small medium and large organisations; male and female).
(b) What are the causes and effects of this problem? Analyse the drivers of the problem and discuss what impacts this problem creates on the affected parties.
(c) Based on the understanding gained from tasks (a) and (b) above, prepare a project development plan to address the client’s problem including the following. Due to the word limit a table with a column each for goals activities competencies challenges and measures of success is suggested for this purpose.

• Goals: What are your three main project goals for the next eight weeks of the semester (i.e., From Week 5 to Week 12)? You may want to consider SMART criteria (i.e., S=specific, M=measurable, A=attainable, R=realistic, and T=time bound when you write your project goals.
• Activities: What specific activities you/your team will perform to achieve the mentioned project goals?
• Competencies: What and how specific skills, disciplinary knowledge, and abilities you have gathered so far in your degree will help accomplish the activities you identified?
• Challenges: What challenges will you face when trying to achieve the above goals?
How will you be overcoming those challenges?
• Measures of success: What specific measures of success will you be using to determine the accomplishment of each stated project goal?

Important:
• Simply reproducing the content in the project brief is not sufficient.
• Please also note that you need to use the tools or frameworks (e.g., problem tree analysis five why’s stakeholder analysis discussed in the Unit appropriately when answering to above questions.
• You are not required to provide solutions and recommendations to the client at this stage
• Support your explanations with evidence from internal (e.g., client’s organisational reports customer feedback survey findings discussions with the Client and external sources (e.g., industry reports, newspapers journals and government publications where appropriate.

BUS30032 Business Consulting Project Assignment 1

Suggested format :-
• Report format:
o Please present your response as a report. You do not need to include an Executive Summary introduction and conclusion.
o Depending on your creativity you are free to structure the report as you wish.
However make sure that you cover all the sections from (a) to (c) above.
o You may use diagrams graphics and tables to present information concisely creatively and effectively.
o Use 12 font size and 1.5 line spacing for formatting the document.

• Research:
o Under pinning all your work is extensive research drawing on relevant sources. This includes but is not limited to, industry reports; academic publications text books articles working papers government reports news regalia and authoritative websites. You must cite and support your claims.
o Please use the APA Style of references to cite and reference your work.

• Submission:
o Submit through Canvas as follows:
– Go to your ‘Assignment 1 – Problem Analysis and Project Development Plan Report’ page on Canvas
– Click on start/submission assignment
– Add a PDF/Microsoft Word compatible file of the report by clicking on the ‘add file’ option.
– Click the ‘submit assignment’ button.