BPP Business School Coursework Cover Sheet

Please use this document as the cover sheet of for the 1st page of your assessment. Please complete the below table – the grey columns

Please complete the yellow sections in the below declaration:

By submitting this coursework you agree to all rules and regulations of BPP regarding assessments and awards for programmes.

Please note that by submitting this assessment you are declaring that you are fit to sit this assessment.

BPP University reserves the right to use all submitted work for educational purposes and may request that work be published for a wider audience.

 MSc Management

 Business Project

 Summative Assessment Brief

1. General Assessment Guidance

• Your summative assessment for this module is made up of this 5000 words submission which accounts for 100% of the marks
• You are required to submit all elements of your assessment via Turnitin online access. Only submissions made via the specified mode will be accepted and hard copies or any other digital form of submissions (like via email or pen drive etc.) will not be accepted.
• For coursework, the submission word limit is 5000 words. You must comply with the word count guidelines. You may submit LESS than 5000 words but not more. Word Count guidelines can be found on your programme home page and the coursework submission page.
• Do not put your name or contact details anywhere on your submission. You should only put your student registration number (SRN) which will ensure your submission is recognised in the marking process.
• A total of 100 marks are available for this module assessment, and you are required to achieve minimum 50% to pass this module.
• You are required to use only Harvard Referencing System in your submission. Any content which is already published by other author(s) and is not referenced will be considered as a case of plagiarism.

· Please note late submissions will not be marked.

You can find further information on Harvard Referencing in the online library on the VLE. You can use the following link to access this information: http://bpp.libguides.com/Home/StudySupport 

• BPP University has a strict policy regarding authenticity of assessments. In proven instances of plagiarism or collusion, severe punishment will be imposed on offenders. You are advised to read the rules and regulations regarding plagiarism and collusion in the GARs and MOPP which are available on VLE in the Academic registry section.
• You should include a completed copy of the Assignment Cover sheet. Any submission without this completed Assignment Cover sheet may be considered invalid and not marked.

2. Assessment Brief

Introduction

This business project assessment requires a 5000-word consultancy report on your chosen company,

i.e. private, public (but not government owned) and NGO. Your chosen company is your client who has asked you to provide the consultancy report following an investigation of a challenge they are facing and resulting issues that are currently impacting the company.

The learning outcomes assessed through this business project report are:

LO1 - Formulate a business project that has strategic importance in the management of organisations in a chosen specialised area.

LO2 - Evaluate the complexity of a business project in relation to the impact on internal and external stakeholders of your chosen specialised area.

LO3 - Articulate a business project appropriate to the context and specialisation of the research topic.

LO4 - Develop clear recommendations and solutions that add strategic value to an organisation / industry.

The report should cover the following key areas:

1. Executive Summary.
2. Introduction.
   1. Challenge and issues the client is facing: Identified challenge and resulting issues explaining how they are connected to the current affairs and emerging trends in the industry and business. Plus, an examination of the problem from the consultant’s perspective.
   2. Purpose of the report – articulation of the challenge, issues, and the organisational specialisation area.
   3. Stakeholder analysis – need to analyse the power and interests of stakeholders in relation to the identified challenge and issues and evaluate impact of research on each stakeholder.
   4. Evaluation and analysis with secondary data (conceptual and numerical).
      1. Recommendations that would resolve the challenge and issues and a conclusion addressing the strategic value of the report.

You are required to discuss how your project would impact stakeholders and provide relevant recommendations which are resulting from the secondary data evaluation, and which could be of value to your chosen organisation. You are required to show your understanding of the importance of strategy in business.

Business Consultancy Report Structure

The following structure reflects a common way of organising final business reports. You are advised to follow this structure, but you can adapt it to reflect the exact nature and details of your project in liaison with in-class supervisors.

• PP Declaration Page
• Title page
• Table of contents
• List of figures/tables/abbreviations – if required
• Executive summary
• Introduction
• Challenge and issues the client is facing
• Purpose of the report
• Stakeholder analysis
• Evaluation and analysis with secondary data
• Recommendations and conclusion
• Harvard references
• Appendices (if required)

The whole report should be 5,000 words. The front cover, table of contents, bibliography, and appendices are not included in this limit.

Word Count Breakdown

The total word count for the business project is 5000 words. It is important that you ensure you cover each section thoroughly. In order to do this, it is recommended that you allocate an approximate word count to each section of the project. Below is an example you could use:

Please note that the above word count is an approximation and should only be used as a rough guide.

Guidelines

Executive Summary

You are required to write one page (approximately 500 words) of an executive summary. The executive summary is not to introduce your report but should be a summary of the whole report. You will therefore need to write this after you complete your report.

It should include what the identified challenge and issues were, and what the purpose of the report was. You are required to discuss how your report would impact on main stakeholders. You should also summarise your critical evaluation results.

Your executive summary should be concluded by any recommendations, making up the final part of your executive summary.

Your readers should be able to understand the focus of your project just by reading the executive summary.

For merit, you should provide a comprehensive and detailed outline of the planned approach for the research.

For distinction, you should provide a clear rationale of why you have chosen to conduct this research project.

Introduction

You need to write this section with three different areas. The first area can be used to explain the context of your consultancy report.The second part can be used to briefly discuss the current challenge and issues in one organisational specialised area in your selected company. This area should be the summary of next section, but you need to set the scene here.

The final part of this section needs to include how the report will be structured, and what the readers can expect to take from your report.

For merit, you should provide an explanation of the importance of the project for business strategy.

For distinction, you should provide a compelling discussion of rationale of why you have chosen to conduct this research project.

Challenge and issues the client is facing

You are required to discuss existing or potential future challenge and issues your chosen company [client company] is facing. This must be founded in recent evidence confirming that the challenge and issues are ongoing and unresolved.

If you decide to discuss current / existing challenge and issues, you will need to evaluate why your chosen company has been facing these issues and connect these to current affairs.

If you would like to discuss possible future challenge and issues which might occur because of the current affairs, you will need to discuss, as consultant’s perspective, why your client company might face challenges in future because of current affairs.

For merit, you should provide a discussion of how the chosen challenge is impacted by current affairs.

For distinction, you should provide a compelling discussion on opportunities and threats posed for your chosen company by current affairs and emerging trends.

Purpose of the report

You are required to state the purpose of the report. You must explain why you are evaluating specific challenge and issues and how this would benefit your client company. Your purpose of the report should be justified by the identified challenge and issues established in section 2. Your purpose of the report will form the question you later evaluate and suggest recommendations for.

For merit, you should provide evidence of currency of the challenge and issues you propose to evaluate using recent references.

For distinction, you should provide a brief discussion of methods [management frameworks] you will use to evaluate the challenge and issues your client company is facing.

Impact of Research on Stakeholders

 In this section, you firstly need to identify who your internal and external stakeholders are in relation to your report. You also need to discuss how your project is connected to different groups of internal and external stakeholders, and finally evaluate how your project would impact these stakeholders.

For merit, you should provide an analysis of each stakeholder’s power and interest in relation to the challenge and issues investigated.

For distinction, you should provide a discussion of relative importance of the various stakeholders that will allow you client company to effectively manage its resources and strategies to ensure success of the project [implementation of recommendations].

Evaluation and analysis with secondary data for your purpose of the report

This section is to show your critical evaluation skills.

You are required to collect secondary data and analyse the data to answer the purpose of the report, including opinions, facts, and statistical information. You should consider including tables or charts using existing data you have collected for effective data presentation. You should ensure that sources of data are referenced correctly.

For the critical evaluation, you should consider application of theoretical frameworks. You may decide to evaluate data you collected without specific frameworks. However, you need to remember to compare and contrast different data and discuss how different data shows different perspective for your purpose of the report.

For merit, you should provide a justification for your choice management framework(s) for the evaluation of secondary data.

For distinction, you should provide a discussion of limitations of the evaluation of secondary data. 

Recommendations and Conclusions

The recommendations offered to resolve the challenge and resulting issues that impact your client company should be justified by the results of the analysis and critical evaluation, and you must also ensure that these recommendations are connected to the purpose of the report. It may be helpful for your readers if you remind them in this section what the purpose of the report was, and how this has been answered by the recommendations.

For the conclusion, you will need to address the key challenge and issues you have evaluated and how you have answered the purpose of the report. You should use evidence from the previous sections to support your conclusion.

For merit, you should provide explanation how the recommendations add strategic value to your client company and the industry.

For distinction, you should provide explanation of strengths and limitations of the recommendations.

References and Presentation

You should use the Harvard referencing system throughout the report (for in-text citations and list of references) and make sure there are no errors in spelling or grammar. You are required to use academic writing and your language should be formal, clear, and precise. The report must be presented as a professional business report.

Your report must use a consistent approach to headings, tables, and graphs. Pages should be clearly numbered, and this should correspond to the page numbers provided in the table of contents.

You are required to show a broad range of reading including academic journal articles.