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Group Assignment

Working in a group of six people, your task is to examine the human resource system of a
division, company, or multiple companies. The purpose of this exercise is to give you experience
using the course concepts in an actual field situation, help develop your clinical and analytical
skills. Provide you the opportunity to "road test" some of the ideas from the course, and to get
some understanding of barriers and issues in the implementation of the course concepts.

Your project can focus on one of the following types of issues: 1) assess the extent to which the
current human resource policies and practices are aligned with the strategy of the firm, the
degree of internal consistency and consistency with the strategy, and what changes you would
recommend; 2) identify a specific human resource problem such as turnover, management
development, etc., diagnose the source of the current problems(s), and provide feasible
recommendations for organizational action; or 3) for a young or rapidly growing organization,
assess its current human resource practices and identify areas of potential problems and also
domains in which the company might leverage its human resources more effectively.

Regardless of which focus you choose, however, part of your assignment is also to identify
human resource practices that the organization knows it should be implementing but that is not
currently doing. In other words, you will undoubtedly encounter instances of misalignment in
which the organization is, at some level, aware that it is not doing what it ought to be doing, but
is doing it anyway. So, in each instance, part of your assignment is to explain why the
organization’s knowledge is not being used and develop an action plan to overcome these
barriers to implementation. This is a critical part of the assignment for it helps you understand
why the concepts of the course are not always readily or easily implemented and provides more
value to the client because you attend to issues of actually accomplishing change as contrasted
with just doing a nice report.

Your insights will be developed from a case study you conduct of an organization or a
department or set of departments. You should use interview, and possibly other methods as well,
to help in your analysis. Possible methods include observation, unstructured, semi-structured, or
structured interviews, questionnaires, or archival information. In doing interviews. It is helpful to
ask more "what" than "why" questions. It is also useful to interview in pairs. Don’t miss the
opportunity to get objective, archival information that will help in your analysis, and don’t miss
the opportunity to get information from different levels in the organization (you may find that the
alignment of human resources looks quite different depending on whether you are talking to the
human resources manager or a first-line supervisor).

Requirements

You will present a summary of what you learned to your class. You will have approximately 20
minutes for the presentation and for discussion time, so plan accordingly.

You are also responsible for turning in a final report, complete with an executive summary, text,
and any supporting data or appendices. This is due on the day you are scheduled to present in
class. Late papers will not be graded. The particular session in which you will present will be
determined by a random drawing.

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