After careful discussion with your Line Manager, choose a project which could be of interest and benefit to your company. Discuss this with your tutor to come up with an agreed area of investigation.

Scenario :        There is a need within BBG to monitor the contact we have with ‘The Auditors’.  To be able to analyse and understand:-

• Reason for contact
• Frequency of contact
• Method of contact

This information will then enable us to negotiate with ‘The Auditors’ an accurate invoicing structure, which can then be more easily allocated to the various Cost Centres within the Company, rather than centrally.

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Task 2 -        Make a careful study of the outcomes and assessment criteria for the unit 

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Task 3 -        Write a report covering your investigation of the project, its viability, and the way in which you managed the information gathered.  Relate this to the required outcomes

Six Stages Of The Process

1. Establish Information for Improvement         

It came to my attention that within our organisation there was a lot of contact with our Auditors that we, within Finance, knew nothing about.  

Group Finance is tasked with keeping charges from the Auditors within control and where possible stop possible duplication of work within the group.

2. Identify Sources of Information

Because of the structure of BBG it is very hierarchical, which in this case makes this a simple task, because the Auditors only deal with ‘Executive Levels’ and each ‘Exec’ has a PA.  Therefore we know that in reality there is only a certain number of staff members who would have direct contact.

3. Gather Information        

• Techniques

This needed to be kept simple otherwise people would not ‘buy-in’ to the initiative – so after considering a complex database set up with people entering the data themselves it was thought that if people had to put little effort into keeping Finance informed then we would have a better chance of the data being regularly updated.

• Select

Because of time restraints of not only staff and our IT department we  went for a simple e-mail in-box, whereby all people had to do was send an e-mail with who, what, when, why they had contact.  This information is then stored within Excel.

• Justify

After a couple of weeks of being implemented the in-box is working well and people are actively using this facility.

4.        Analytical Techniques

• Within Excel it is possible to retrieve a variety of data according to how it is set up.
• Name of people involved
• Reasons why etc
• Levels of accuracy – reliability – we have also asked the Auditors to monitor the contact with BBG and we will within the next few months compare data.

5. Record and Store

• We are very limited with our IT Department and the amount of resource they will offer – so the data will be stored on a Group Server with limited access to my Line Manager and myself.

6. Dissemination

• Within BBG we hold PA forums, whereby all the PA’s for the Company Executives meet on a regular basis to discuss matters of ‘universal interest’, so I did a small presentation on my data capturing requirements.

I will also send out regular updates via e-mail and I am in the process of having the process put on our internal intranet site.

 

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Bibliography

Management Information - Front Line Magazine – Edition 2/2003 – KPMG

HNC HND BTEC Business – BPP Publishing (2000)

Various handouts from Lecturer

Websites Accessed – November 2003

http://www.bized.ac.uk/stafsup/options/bus/bus_g.htm 

http://www.cwis.livjm.com

http://www.shipley.ac.uk/learn/hnc/unit2/

http://cwis.livjm.ac.uk