MB925 Managing People In Organisations Group Coursework Assignment Brief | University of Strathclyde

Your task

You are an HR consultant who has been commissioned by the UK Government to review the recent research that has been conducted on HR issues in the NHS. In order to help your investigation a number of key recent research articles and other related reports have been highlighted as helping to inform your review (and these are listed below). More specifically, having assessed this material the Government wants you to highlight what you think the three most pressing HR issues are facing the NHS. Having outlined these issues you are then tasked with suggesting a number of recommendations for how these issues might be addressed. Without wishing to be too prescriptive it is felt that the use of PESTLE and SWOT analysis will be useful to begin to highlight the key people management issues facing the NHS. Use of these tools allows you to take account of key contextual/environmental factors that are impacting on the organisation and the manner in which they may shape people-related/HR aspects within the NHS.

Further guidance:

As is highlighted above the use of PESTLE and SWOT analysis is likely to be helpful in thinking about how you develop your report. To get some further ideas about how this might be used within a HR context have a look at the factsheets produced by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), which is the professional association for HR in the UK. You can find these factsheets and an exemplar template from CIPD of a PESTLE analysison the MyPlace page. In addition, the Society for Human Resource Management’s (SHRM) guide to practicing strategic human resource managementis also available on MyPlace as a useful resource in thinking about how to identify and discuss the HR issues facing the NHS.

Plan your focus, argument and academic rationale. Please note: there is no ‘one best way’ to prepare this critical report. It is possible to examine key HR issues in the NHS from a number of perspectives. You simply need to decide upon your approach and argument, but then you must defend it with the evidence from the academic literature and other sources and also make clear links to how this discussion informs your later recommendations.

If you do use PESTLE and SWOT analysis to avoid these elements inflating your word count you can include them in your appendix to the report.