HRM 592 Week 3 Course Project

HRM 592 Week 3 Course Project

The Course Project must be comprehensive and follow the analytical stages below.

1. Select an organization to be studied.
2. Develop and conduct a needs assessment.
3. Analyze the data collected and identify training needs.
4. Develop a training or intervention strategy to address the needs.
5. Determine the training intervention cost and quantify expected results.
6. Develop an evaluation method.

Once the steps have been completed, a detailed paper outlining your processes, methodologies, results, and recommendations should be prepared. Although the length of the paper is not predetermined, a paper of 10–15 pages in length, double-spaced, is customarily necessary to cover the topic adequately. This does not include the title and reference pages.

Note: There is an excellent guide online called Human Capital: A Guide for Assessing Strategic Training and Development Efforts in the Federal Government put out by the United States General Accounting Office. Although this relates to the government and not the private sector, it contains excellent information that can be applied anywhere.

Milestones: Project Phases—In Detail

Part 1: Select an Organization to Be Studied

There are a number of ways in which an organization can be selected. One option is to look outside your organization for companies that would be interested in participating in the project. Another is to volunteer your own organization, or if you are not currently employed, use a church, school, club, or other organization.

Once your organization has been selected, you will need to learn a lot about it. It is essential for you to understand the organization’s business, goals, objectives, and mission in order to complete this project successfully. (Submit the information on your selected organization to your Dropbox by the end of Week 1—this is an ungraded step but required and essential to help you make sure you are on the right track.) Also note that you will be submitting a progress report for this project in Week 5 in the Minipaper assignment—this is worth 100 points.

Part 2: Conduct a Needs Assessment

Training and development processes begin with a needs assessment. Given the economic pressures that businesses face today, it is imperative that those needs be connected to specific organizational performance issues.

There are three different forms of analysis you will need to complete.

1. Organizational analysis involves determining the appropriateness of training given the organization’s business strategy, its resources available for training, and support by managers and peers for training activities.
2. Person analysis involves (1) determining whether performance deficiencies result from a lack of knowledge, skill, or ability (a training issue) or from a motivational or work-design problem; (2) identifying who needs training; and (3) determining employees’ readiness for training.
3. Task analysis identifies the important tasks and knowledge, skill, and behaviors that need to be emphasized in training for employees to complete their tasks.

Hints for a Successful Needs Assessment 

As you conduct your needs assessment, you may want to consider four potential sources of information that may help you in your analysis. Information such as employee turnover analysis, incident reports, long-range production goals, employee satisfaction studies, and physical plant layout can tell us a lot. Examples of other documents you may wish to consider include the following.

• Business documents: Key business documents can be used to determine areas of poor performance and developmental needs. Such documents may include

• 1. unit productivity reports;
  2. customer satisfaction surveys;
  3. communication survey reports; and
  4. competitive analysis reports.

• Organization survey: Questionnaires can be created that probe for areas in which systems, structures, or processes are not functioning as intended. They can be used to look toward group, departmental, or individual issues. (Submit your survey to be used for gathering data by the end of Week 3—70 points.)

Potential questions include the following.

• Observations: Individuals can be observed on the job, and their interactions and activities can be noted for further analysis. Observations can include the following.

1. 1. How individuals communicate (time spent, amount of detail, responsiveness)
   2. How individuals make decisions (time spent, involvement sought, etc.)
   3. How work is performed (under pressure, in groups, etc.)

• Interviews: Interviews can be conducted in person or via a distributed questionnaire that probes for areas where performance may be improved. Potential interview questions include the following.

1. 1. What do you think the most important part of your job is? What is least important?
   2. What would you like to learn to make your job easier or better? What are the programs, processes, or resources available for you to learn from?
   3. How have you developed the skills that you have?
   4. Who brings problems to you and what kind of problems are they? How do you usually solve them? Whom do you ask for help?
   5. What do you find most frustrating about your job?
   6. What would you like to be spending your time doing? What would need to happen to let you do that?

It is up to you to determine the methodology to be used in conducting the assessment. Considerations should include the willingness of the organization and its employees to provide information, the availability of information from the organization to be studied, and the availability of individuals in the organization to be interviewed and observed.

The nature of the needs analysis, of course, also should be based on the type of assessment desired. Given the broad coverage of the course, assessment may include, but would not be limited to, the following.

1. 1. Group processes and group effectiveness
   2. Departmental effectiveness
   3. Decision-making process effectiveness
   4. Individual skills development
   5. Group skills development

Career development