The basic assignment brief is set out in the Course Outline so make sure you read this brief before working through the following notes – these notes expand on the brief set out in the Course Outline.

 

Your report needs to be written with the organisation's Board/Governing-body as its audience, so everything must focus on key issues relevant to the organisation in question that would be addressed at that level.

 

Note that this assignment differs from the group assignment. The individual assignment is an organisational analysis on issues of ethics, governance and sustainability. It is not an issue-specific analysis. So please keep an eye on this and do not fall for the trap of picking an ‘issue’ (say, the BP Deep Horizon incident, Apple and its ‘green IT’ ranking, Nike and its use of slave labour… etc…). You instead need to look at an organisation in a holistic sense, analyse it in terms of ethics, governance and sustainability issues, and develop a report for the Board on this.

 

Situational analysis:

Key issues

• The key issues should be identified following a thorough analysis of the organisation using various analysis tools and models from the material from this and other courses.
• There are a number of frameworks that can be used to conduct this analysis, and many of these have been developed into worksheets available from the course Learnonline site. Worksheets should go in the appendices of your report.
• The key here is to NOT put the detailed analysis in the body of the report – it belongs in appendices. What is needed is the pulling out of the analysis data key issues of relevance to the organisation on which you build your arguments. That is, you need to look at the whole set of data you have collected and identify the messages that come from it.
• Key issues can be positives and negatives – things that organisation is doing well or has the potential to leverage up, and things that are not so good or down-right bad. What matters is what you find in your analysis that are key issues relevant in addressing its goals and objectives from which you will, later in the report, set out recommendations for action for the organisation to address.
• Be mindful of the difference between key issues and symptoms of issues. One of the common problem areas with this assignment is a symptom of an issue being taken as the core issue that needs addressing. One way to test this is to ask "why" in relation to something you identify - keep asking "why is this thing arising" until you get to a core problem. In your report you may for example find it useful to present the key issue you finally identify and set out some of the symptoms of that issue and the implications that flow from it.
• So a way to lead into this part of your report might be something like "A detailed analysis of the organisation from an ethics, governance and sustainability perspective has been conducted (see Appendices A, B, C and D) and the key issues identified are as follows:…"

 

Implications and arguments for change

• For this point, it's important to consider the implications of the issues you have identified. What flows from them for the organisation or for other parties the organisation should take into consideration?
• Importantly, you need to argue a case for change. This is most important as without a convincing argument, nothing will happen. Any change event carries risk, and the Board will need to be motivated to take the risk and follow your recommendations (which come later in the report). At this point the Board members need to be disturbed to the point that they are wanting solutions to the issues the firm is facing – so your arguments for change need to do that disturbing.

 

Goals:

• Without clear goals, there is little that can be done by way of making recommendation for change. Recommendations need to send an organisation somewhere and it is the goals that give this direction.
• So what are needed here are some clear organisational goals that are built around what is important for the organization to achieve.
• What these goals are is something you need to think about but remember we are dealing with things the Board would consider so stay focused at this level. At this level, goals are likely to need to be more strategic in nature than might apply at an operation level.
• The goals should also be SMART goals – don’t make them too motherhood or fuzzy to the point that they can’t be actioned, measured, or tracked in a meaningful way.
• You also need to present a case as to why these goals matter – don’t just list of a few ‘we should do these’ items – think through why the organization should pursue them and make a case for your proposals.
• One final point. Some students have found that their goals and recommendations end up looking very similar. If you find this is the case for you, it's a sign that something is probably not right with your goals. Goals are the destination, recommendations the process. So if you find a recommendation is pretty well that same as a goal, then your goal should be the first place you look to as this is most likely not constructed as a strategic positioning or outcome for the organisation.

 

Recommendations:

• The recommendation section needs to pull the whole report together.
• What is important here is to not just make a list of things to do. The recommendations need to specifically address the key issues you identified at the beginning of the report and contribute to the achievement of the goals you have set.
• Recommendations also need to be subject to SMART criteria.
• You need to show not just the recommendations as in 'I recommend the Board do this' but also to show the issues each recommendation will address and the goals it will help achieve. Further, some reasons as to why it will address the issues and achieve the goals are needed – you need to back your claims up and there is plenty of material in the course to help you here. So what we have is something along the lines of "I recommend the Board do this. It will address issue 'X' because…. and will help contribute to goal 'Y' because….."
• A useful tool some students have used to help with the mapping of issues to goals to recommendations is a simple 3-column diagram showing key issues in the first column, recommendations in the second, and goals in the third. Then arrows are shown linking the parts together (that is, showing which issues each of the recommendations addresses and which goals they contribute to). This table can be helpful as an 'audit' of your own work plus give a concise picture to the report reader, but if you do this, it should be as an added visual not as a substitute for discussing the points the table summarises.