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from assignment score for each day late
20/05/2022 3 days after deadline (block delivery) – zero-scored

Unit title & code Operations and Project Management

Assignment number and title Assessment 2
Assessment type Individual Report
Weighting of assessment 60%
Size or length of assessment 4000 words excluding appendices and references (10% excess is allowable)

Completing Your Assignment

Park Town Residence – Please note that this is simulated rather than real data.
Park Town Residence (PTR) is a Housing Association operting in Thai Nguyen province with the mission to provide
appropriate housing for local community with a particular focus on providing assistance and support to vulnerable
individuals. PTR operates from a central office suite located in Thai Nguyen city but also own and manage several distinct
housing blocks, split into General Purpose Housing and Supported Housing.

General Purpose Housing

• Four housing blocks in various locations across Thai Nguyen, each with an individual management office

Supported Housing
• Emergency hostel for single young people aged 16-25
• Transitional flats for 16 to 18 years old leaving care
• Two hostels for young mothers aged 16-25

PTR has separate departments for General Purpose Housing and Supported Housing.

The General Purpose Housing department is run via separate distinct functional teams within the organisation, each
responsible for tracking and managing issues within their own area. There is a finance team, a facilities maintenance team
and a customer service team. When residents have an issue or problem, they first contact the customer service team and then
are passed onto relevant members of the other teams if needed.

Each team currently uses a separate system to retain and track information within their functional areas, using emailed
requests to exchange information when requested, often in the form of attached Word and Excel documents. The finance
team uses primarily Excel spreadsheets, Word documents and a specialised Misa Accounting, there is also a shared folder on
the company Sharepoint server, with restricted access to non-authorised employees. The facilities maintenance team uses a
 specialist cloud-based system called 360Facility to manage their facilities. Only the Facilities maintenance team has access to
360Facility. The customer services team uses a mixture of Excel spreadsheets for keeping data for each of the four housing
blocks alongside Word and plain text documents to keep track of current and solved issues with individual residents.

The Supported Housing department also uses functional teams with similar systems to manage their facilities but also assigns
a Personal Coach to each resident to assess their individual needs and to arrange support services where required. The
Personal Coaches are responsible for keeping confidential and sensitive information about their residents in secure password-
protected Word documents on company laptops that only they and the Supported Housing Team Leader have access to. This
confidential and sensitive information is not shared with any of the other functional teams. These documents are only kept
on the relevant company laptops with regular backups onto a secure hard-drive that is kept in the main Luton Town Centre
office in a locked room.

Staff Numbers
Finance Team: 10 staff
Facilities Maintenance Team: 8 staff
Customer Service Team: 15 staff
Supported Housing Personal Coaches: 15 staff
General Administration Staff: 8 staff
Senior Management Team: 10 staff

Organisational communication
Most communication within PTR occurs using email, with several employees complaining about the difficulty in managing the
large volumes of email sent and received every day.

Organisation-wide information is shared through daily newsletters, which are emailed to everyone at PTR every morning. Key
information shared here often is missed or ignored by employees, which necessitates managers to send reminder emails
directly to employees after the newsletter has been distributed.

The customer services team in particular has complained about difficulty in getting responses to emailed requests for
information to other teams, often resulting in residents having to wait several days.

There are company laptops issued to some employees, mostly Personal Coaches working with Supported Housing residents,
but all other employees have access to their own PC, with a local storage area that they manage themselves and access to a
Sharepoint drive that is managed centrally. The Sharepoint drive is mostly used by the Finance team to ensure access and
version control for key financial documents.

What am I required to do in this assignment?

You will be applying the Case Study data on the operations of Park Town Residences (PTR) with a focus on data storage and
sharing, internal communications and collaboration. With this information you will be required to write a 4,000-word business
report (word-count excluding cover page, bibliography / reference list and appendices) with responses to the following:

1. Give an overview of the current operational systems in place to facilitate internal communications and connect
data silos with reference to academic concepts, models and theories.

2. Give reasoned recommendations to improve and/or add to these operational systems. Support your
recommendations with high-quality evidence where possible.

3. Present a Project Plan to implement your operational recommendations, including, at minimum, a WBS (Work
Breakdown Structure), Risk Management Plan and proposed Budget.
Additional Guidance

1. The balance between case study analysis and the actual planning/recommendations– ensure that your submissions
are balanced with regards to analysis and recommendations. For example, do not use a lot of space summarising the
case study, at the expense of developing your recommendations and considering potential issues.
2. Academic content – you are expected to include academic material into your report rather than relying upon online
sources alone. You need to demonstrate an understanding of the theoretical background of operations and project
management through your citation of relevant academic content.
3. Presentation and structure – to achieve an excellent grade, your presentation also should be excellent – this includes
numbering tables, referencing correctly etc. Do not present a lot of data and information in tables as appendices. Data
or statistics that refer directly to your discussion in the main body, should be presented in the main body. Tables and
figures – tables and figures need to be numbered and each should have a title that is self-explanatory. Your analytical
content must be high, demonstrating critical thinking and the ability to apply relevant project management concepts
4. Word limit – 4,000 words. This will exclude your references in the executive summary, reference list, title page, table of
contents and the appendices. Please, note that your cover page must have your Full Name, ID Number, class, faculty,
course name and word count)
5. References must be followed Havard style.
6. Poor spelling, punctuation and presentation will be penalised.
7. The individual assignment 2 must be submitted electronically (both file word and pdf) to the instructor – Nguyen Thi
Hoa Hong via Assignment in class MS Teams by Friday 20/5/2022 – 11pm
8. Recommended Structure Outline
1. Cover page
2. Executive summary
3. Table of Contents
4. Business Report
4.1. Introduction: Explain the purpose of the report, expand on the task set, give necessary background or
contextual information, define key term, explain the layout of the report.
4.2. Overview of Current Operational Systems
4.3. Reasoned Recommendations: Give strong justified recommendation for improving operational systems. This
must NOT be simply taken from advertising copy or marketing material of your preferred choice. The
recommendation MUST be strongly justified in terms of the existing systems (e.g. identify a problem and
explain how your recommendation will fix it) and bring in critical literature review (e.g. bring in literature
review on cloud ERP rather than just traditional ERP, etc.) to have a high-quality informed discussion.
4.4. Project Plan: You should present your overall project plan for the recommendation – a short introduction
describing how your project will be run, e.g. the overall time-frame and value proposition. You need to then
discuss the scope management, risk management and budget of your project with a full-time management
plan being strongly recommended. (Mandatory: SOW, WBS, Risk Impact Matrix, Risk Score, Risk mitigation
strategies, Project Budget by 2 appoaches; Optional: Network Diagram, and Critical Path)
4.5. Conclusion/Summary: Straightforward and concise summary of the major points from your three sections
(4.2, 4.3, 4.4).
5. Reference List: Use appropriate references, mix of academic and non-academic sources, make sure they actually
support argument rather than just ones that appear to be credible.