ENGM115 Organisations and Systems Assessment Brief 2026/27 University of Sunderland

1. Module and Assessment Information 

2. Assessment Purpose

Modern organisational problems rarely belong to only one department, process, technology or stakeholder group. A difficulty that appears at first to be ‘a customer service issue’ or ‘an IT problem’ is usually the visible symptom of a wider system of people, processes, data, technology, governance and external pressures interacting with one another. Postgraduate practitioners are expected to be able to step back from a single symptom, frame the underlying system, choose appropriate methods of enquiry, and use the resulting evidence to justify a realistic organisational response.

In this assessment you will use Teesside International Airport as the case organisation. You are required to: 

• define a specific organisational or systemic challenge within the case organisation;
• establish a clear system boundary and context for your investigation;
• explicitly justify the systems paradigm — hard, soft, or hybrid — underpinning your analysis;
• identify the stakeholders, sub-systems and interdependencies relevant to that boundary;
• select appropriate analytical and modelling methods from those covered on the module;
• justify why the methods you selected are appropriate for your specific problem; 

apply your selected methods to appropriate evidence; integrate and synthesise findings across the methods you have applied; derive a set of prioritised, evidence-based requirements; recommend one feasible and justified organisational change; and critically evaluate the limitations and uncertainty within your own analysis.

“Strong MSc work does not simply use tools. It makes defensible choices about why particular tools are appropriate, what they reveal, what they miss, and how the evidence should inform change.”

3. Learning Outcomes

This assessment maps to the following official module learning outcomes. The wording below is preserved from the approved module documentation and has not been altered.

• K1 (Knowledge): A critical comprehension of appropriate methods and tools to understand organisations and systems. 
• K2 (Knowledge): Awareness of modelling methods and tools. 
• Skills Outcome: The ability to select and apply appropriate methods and tools to understand organisational systems.
• Skills Learning Outcome Code: S3 (as used in the existing approved ENGM115 module documentation).

4. Case-Study Context: Teesside International Airport

Teesside International Airport is the common case organisation for this assessment. The airport is a live, multi-stakeholder, safety-regulated operational environment involving passengers, airlines, ground-handling and security providers, regional and national government stakeholders, commercial partners, and regulatory bodies — making it a suitable and realistic setting for postgraduate organisational and systems analysis.

As background only: at the time this case study was last formally documented, the airport had recently returned to public ownership and had been renamed and rebranded, and was handling in the region of 160,000 passengers a year. Ownership, branding, passenger volumes, routes and commercial partnerships (for example, hangar and lease agreements) can all change over time treat these figures as historical orientation only, not as current fact (see the hint below). 

Hint: Do not rely on older statistics, passenger numbers, route lists or commercial details you may find in older materials and present them as current facts. Passenger volumes, routes, ownership and commercial partnerships at the airport can change from year to year. Locate current, credible evidence at the time you undertake the assessment — see Section 9, Research and Evidence Expectations, for guidance on suitable sources.

You must not attempt to analyse the entire airport as an organisation. You are required to select and justify ONE significant organisational or systemic challenge within the airport that is narrow enough to analyse rigorously within the word limit, but rich enough to support meaningful systems analysis.

Possible examples of a suitable challenge include (this list is illustrative only, and you are not restricted to it):

• passenger experience across the departure or arrival journey; 
• operational coordination between airside and landside functions;
• digital transformation of passenger-facing or operational systems;
• commercial development and diversification of revenue streams;
• stakeholder and governance complexity across public and private interests;
• information and data flows between operational functions; 

• process integration across security, baggage, or turnaround operations;
• supplier or partner relationships (e.g. ground handlers, airlines, retail concessions); 
• service improvement in a specific operational area; or 
• organisational capability to support future growth or change.

Whichever challenge you choose, it must be specific enough to support a defined system boundary, identifiable stakeholders, and meaningful application of analytical and modelling methods. A general description of ‘the airport’ as a whole, without a defined analytical problem, will not meet the requirements of this assessment.

5. Assessment Task and Structure

5.1 Overview

This is an individual professional report addressed to a senior organisational decision-maker at Teesside International Airport. The report must demonstrate a coherent analytical journey from problem framing, through justified method selection and application, to prioritised requirements, a recommended organisational change, and honest critical evaluation of your own analysis. The overall structure and indicative word allocation is as follows: 

 The reference list and approved appendices do not count towards the word limit. You must not use appendices or tables to circumvent the word limit substantive analysis, argument and interpretation must appear in the main body of the report.

5.2 Executive Summary (≈200 words)

Write a concise, professional executive summary addressed to a senior organisational decision-maker. It must state, in summary form: 
the problem investigated; the system context; the methods selected; the most significant findings; and your principal recommendation. 
The Executive Summary must not become a generic introduction. It should read as a decision-maker would expect — stating conclusions and the recommendation up front, not simply previewing the structure of the report.

5.3 Part 1 — Integrated Organisational and Systems Diagnosis (≈1,700 words)

This is the principal analytical section of the report and is structured in three sub-sections.

Part 1A — Problem and System Context 
Define the specific organisational or systemic problem or opportunity you are investigating. You must identify and clearly present:

• system purpose;
• the problem or opportunity itself; 
• the system boundary; 
• important sub-systems; 
• stakeholders; 
• interfaces and dependencies; 
• external influences; 
• people, processes, technology, data/information and governance/rules operating within the boundary; 
• assumptions, uncertainty and information gaps.

You must produce a System Context Map and include the full model in Appendix A. The model should demonstrate the interactions between People, Process, Data/Information, Technology, Governance/Rules and the External Environment.

An organisational chart alone is NOT a System Context Map.

Required analytical question: “Why have you drawn the system boundary where you have, and how could a different boundary change your interpretation of the problem?”

Part 1A(ii) - Methodological and Philosophical Positioning (Required)

Before selecting your methods in Part 1B, you must explicitly position your problem within a systems paradigm. State and justify whether your chosen challenge is best understood as:

• a hard, well-structured system (a technical or operational problem with a broadly agreed, definable objective, amenable to optimisation and process/data modelling); or
• a soft, ill-structured problem situation (a messy, contested situation involving multiple stakeholder worldviews Weltanschauungen where the ‘problem’ itself is disputed and cannot be reduced to a single objective function); or 
   
  

  a hybrid situation with both hard and soft elements, requiring a combination of perspectives.

This is not a formality. Your positioning must be argued with reference to the systems literature (for example, the distinction between hard systems engineering approaches and Checkland’s Soft Systems Methodology), and it must visibly shape and constrain your method choices in Part 1B a hard-systems positioning that is then justified only with soft, interpretive methods (or vice-versa) without explanation will be treated as an internal inconsistency.

Required analytical question: “Is your chosen problem better understood as a hard, well-defined system, or as a soft, ill-structured situation involving multiple worldviews? Justify your positioning, and explain how it shapes your subsequent choice of methods.”

Part 1B — Selection of Methods

You must select THREE methods in total — ONE from each of the following groups:

• Group A - Strategic / Organisational Analysis (choose one): PESTLE; Porter’s Five Forces; SWOT.
• Group B - Systems / Modelling (choose one): Process Modelling; IDEF0; Data/Entity Modelling; Rich Picture or another appropriate Soft Systems representation.
• Group C - Investigation / Fact-Finding (choose one): Interview design; 
  Questionnaire design; Document analysis; Observation design; Stakeholder workshop / facilitated investigation design. 
  You are not required, and are not expected, to apply every method taught on the module. The ability to select and justify appropriate methods for your specific problem is itself part of what is being assessed.

For each of your three selected methods, critically explain:

• why this method is appropriate for this specific problem;
• what type of question it helps answer;
• what it can reveal;
• what it cannot reveal;
• what assumptions it makes; 
• what evidence it requires; and
• what limitations or risks of interpretation it creates.

You must also identify at least TWO alternative methods you considered but did not select, with a brief justification for why each rejected alternative was less suitable for your problem. This comparative judgement is a key MSc-level requirement of this section.

Part 1C — Application and Integrated Analysis

Apply your three selected methods to appropriate evidence. 

Do not structure this section as three unrelated mini-essays.

You must integrate your findings across methods. Your analysis should explicitly consider: findings supported by multiple methods; findings visible only through one method; stakeholder tensions; contradictions between sources or methods; interdependencies and possible causal relationships;

• assumptions that have been incorrectly presented as facts;
• areas of strong evidence and areas of weak evidence; 
• information gaps and residual uncertainty.

Use the following conceptual chain to guide your synthesis:

EVIDENCE  →  METHOD  →  FINDING  →  INTERDEPENDENCY  →  INTERPRETATION 
 
Mandatory synthesis question: “What can you understand by combining the selected methods that could not have been understood from any single method alone?”

This is one of the most heavily weighted elements of the assessment (see the Marking Rubric, Section 15).

5.4 Part 2 — Requirements and Organisational Change (≈700 words)

Having completed your diagnosis, you must now move from analysis to proposed improvement.

Part 2A — Prioritised Requirements

Derive 5–8 prioritised organisational/system requirements. Every requirement must be traceable to a specific finding or piece of evidence presented in Part 1.

Present these in a Requirements Traceability Table (an example structure and an illustrative row are shown below; include your completed table as Appendix E): 

A requirement is NOT the same as a predetermined product or solution.

WEAK: “The organisation needs SAP.”

BETTER: “The organisation requires a single, controlled and accessible source of operational information across relevant functions.” 
SAP, Oracle, Odoo or another named technology might later be considered as a possible solution once requirements are established, but a named product must not be treated as a requirement in itself.

Part 2B — One Prioritised Organisational Change

Recommend ONE significant, prioritised improvement. Do not provide a long list of generic recommendations.

Structure your recommendation as: 

CURRENT STATE (AS-IS)  →  PROPOSED CHANGE  →  FUTURE STATE (TO-BE) 
 
Your recommendation must critically consider:

• expected benefits;
• affected stakeholders;
• process implications;
• information/data implications;
• technology implications, where relevant; 
• governance implications; 
• organisational capability; 
• training and skills implications, where relevant; 
• dependencies and implementation risks; 
• resistance and culture; and 
• unintended consequences.

Where relevant, you may discuss ERP, CRM, integration, data platforms, automation, AI, or digital workflows — but a technological solution is not compulsory.

This is an organisational and systems analysis assessment, not a software-development assessment. No programming is required.

5.5 Part 3 Critical Evaluation (≈400 words) 

This section must not simply summarise the report.

Critically evaluate:

• your most important assumptions; 
• your strongest conclusions;
• your weakest conclusions; 
• uncertainty and evidence limitations; 
• method limitations; 
• your boundary choice;

conflicts between different methods; missing stakeholders or unavailable evidence; potential bias; what further investigation would be required; and what new evidence might change your recommendation.

Address explicitly:

• “Where did the selected methods agree?” 
• “Where did they produce different or conflicting insights?”
• “How did your choice of system boundary influence the conclusions?” 
• “What evidence would cause you to revise your recommendation?”

6. Required Student Deliverables 

You must submit a single Word or PDF document (per current University submission instructions) containing: 

1. A professional report of approximately 3,000 words (±10%), structured as set out in Section 5 and Section 14 (Recommended Report Structure);
2. A complete Harvard reference list, consistent with your in-text citations;
3. A professional evidence pack of appendices, as specified in Section 7; 
4. A word count declaration on the title page or in the header/footer of your submission.

7. Appendices / Professional Evidence Pack

You are required to provide a professional evidence pack, at minimum comprising: 

Depending on your selections in Part 1B, your evidence may additionally include a PESTLE, Five Forces or SWOT analysis; a Rich Picture, Process Model, IDEF0 or Data/Entity Model; and an interview schedule, questionnaire, document-analysis framework, observation protocol or workshop design, as appropriate.

“The appendix is evidence, not a dumping ground.”

“Every major appendix must be explicitly referred to, interpreted and used within the main report.” 

A professional-looking diagram that is never analysed in the main text will not receive high marks simply because of its presentation quality.

8. Primary Research and Ethics

You must NOT collect primary data from human participants unless this has been explicitly authorised and all relevant University ethical requirements have been satisfied.

Where live primary data collection has not been authorised for this assessment, you may:

• design an interview; 
• design a questionnaire;
• design a stakeholder workshop; or
• design an observation protocol, but you must not administer any of these instruments to real participants. Assessment of this element focuses on the quality of your design, the strength of your methodological justification, an honest discussion of limitations, and your proposed use of the resulting evidence — not on real fieldwork data.

9. Research and Evidence Expectations

You are expected to engage with a substantial and appropriate body of academic literature, at a depth consistent with MSc-level critical scholarship. As an indicative minimum expectation, your work should draw on:

AT LEAST 16 appropriate academic sources

including a meaningful proportion of peer-reviewed journal articles, academic conference papers, and relevant academic books or texts. 
A strong submission would normally engage with more literature where this adds analytical value. However, quality, relevance, interpretation and integration of evidence are more important than simply increasing the number of references.

Citing a source is not the same as engaging with it critically. You are required to identify and critically compare at least TWO competing theoretical or methodological perspectives relevant to your chosen challenge (for example: contrasting views on hard vs soft systems approaches; competing organisational-change models; or differing scholarly positions on your chosen strategic framework). Simply listing references that all agree with one another, or treating a textbook model as an unproblematic given, will not meet MSc expectations. 
Current academic research should normally support contemporary organisational claims. 
Older seminal or foundational literature may be used where methodologically justified — for

example, in relation to established systems or modelling approaches. There is no absolute rule that all references must be less than ten years old.

You may also draw on authoritative government sources, regulator publications, airport/company reports, professional or industry evidence, and credible current news sources where relevant to the factual case. These sources do not replace academic literature. Wikipedia, generic commercial web pages, blogs and YouTube must not be used as substitutes for scholarly evidence.

10. Referencing

• You must use the Harvard Reference System throughout.
• In-text citations and the final reference list must be fully consistent with one another. 
• Do not include a general bibliography containing sources that were not actually cited in the text.

11. Generative AI and Academic Integrity 

[INSERT CURRENT UNIVERSITY OF SUNDERLAND APPROVED GENERATIVE AI AND ACADEMIC INTEGRITY GUIDANCE FOR THIS ASSESSMENT BEFORE RELEASE TO STUDENTS] 
 
Mandatory AI Use Declaration: You must submit a completed AI Use Declaration together with your report, in the format specified by the Module Leader on Canvas / VLE, disclosing whether and how generative AI tools were used in preparing your submission.

Generative AI Use – Option 2: Permitted, subject to conditions

The use of Generative AI tools is permitted for this assessment, subject to the conditions below.

Students may use Generative AI to support activities such as:

• generating initial ideas or questions;  
• exploring possible structures for analysis;  
• developing search terms for further research;  
• checking clarity, grammar and presentation;  
• testing alternative ways of framing an organisational or systems problem.  

Generative AI must not replace the student’s own critical analysis, judgement, evidence selection, modelling, synthesis or recommendations. 
Students remain responsible for the accuracy, relevance and academic integrity of all submitted work. AI-generated information must not be treated as an academic or authoritative source unless independently verified against appropriate scholarly or professional evidence.

Any use of Generative AI must be declared in accordance with University guidance. Where AI-generated content is incorporated into the submission, it must be appropriately acknowledged/cited in line with the current University of Sunderland requirements.

Students must be able to explain and defend the analysis, models, assumptions and recommendations presented in their submission.

Failure to disclose AI use, or submitting AI-generated work as if it were entirely the student’s own independent work, may be addressed under the University’s academic integrity procedures. 
 
Submissions made without a completed AI Use Declaration will not be marked and will be treated as a rejected submission.

12. Submission Information 

• Submission Method: Canvas / VLE via Turnitin, in accordance with current University instructions. 
• Submission Date: Monday 14th December  2026 
• Submission Time: 23:59 
• Module Leader: Mays Abukeshek

Late submission, extenuating circumstances and academic misconduct are governed by current University of Sunderland regulations. Students should consult the current Student Handbook and Canvas / VLE module site for full details, as this brief does not reproduce full institutional regulations.

Your uploaded submission must include your name and University of Sunderland student number on the first page. Failure to do this will result in a reduction of the presentation mark.

13. Recommended Report Structure

The following structure is recommended. You do not need to use this exact heading wording, provided your own structure is equally clear and professional: 

1. Title Page
2. Executive Summary 
3. Introduction and Problem Definition 
4. System Context and Boundary
5. Selection and Justification of Methods 
6. Integrated Organisational and Systems Analysis
7. Prioritised Requirements
8. Recommended Organisational Change
9. Critical Evaluation
10. Conclusion 
11. References
12. Appendices
13. Marking Rubric

The assessment is marked against the following weighted criteria, totalling exactly 100%. Full descriptors for each grade band are provided in Section 16. 

15. Grade Bands

The grade bands used for this assessment are retained from the existing University of Sunderland assessment scale: 
•    70% and above 
•    55–69% 
•    40–54% 
•    Below 40%

16. Detailed Marking Rubric and Grade Descriptors

The table below provides full descriptors for each criterion at each grade band, to support consistent marking across multiple markers. 

17. What Will Not Achieve a High Mark

A high mark will NOT be achieved by: 

• defining each tool from a textbook; 
• completing templates without interpretation; 
• producing a large SWOT list with no prioritisation;
• inserting diagrams without explaining what they reveal; 
• treating assumptions as established facts; 
• claiming causation without evidence; 
• recommending software before defining requirements; 
• using many references without integrating them into analysis; 
• providing recommendations that cannot be traced to evidence; 
• placing substantive analysis only in appendices; and 
• describing the airport generally without defining a specific analytical problem; 
• adopting a hard-systems or soft-systems positioning without justifying why it fits the nature of the problem, or selecting methods inconsistent with that positioning; and 
• citing the minimum number of sources without critically comparing competing theoretical or methodological perspectives.