Assignment Problem: Business Management Skills
CCF & MB case study - Capital City Finance and Mortgage Brokers (CCF & MB)
Assignment Task 1: Developing and nurturing relationships with clients, other professionals and third-party referrers
Peter and Jill now require you to write a plan to assist in developing and nurturing relationships with clients, other professionals and third-party referrers.
The layout and content of your plan should address the following:
Q1. How CCF & MB's policies and procedures and legislative, regulatory and professional codes of practice impact on developing and nurturing relationships.
Q2. How you would use CCF & MB's social, business and ethical standards to develop and maintain positive relationships.
Q3. The importance of confidentiality and how you would maintain it in your dealings with colleagues, clients and other parties.
Q4. How you would adjust your interpersonal style to the needs and situation of other parties.
Q5. How you would go about developing and maintaining business and professional networks and other relationships to benefit the organisation; and how you would use them to identify and cultivate relationships in order to promote and market the organisation.
Q6. How you could use and cooperate with other professionals and third parties to expand and enhance the reputation of the organisation, and to identify new and improved business practices.
Q7. How you would build referral business through appropriate communication channels, to find and secure new business relationships.
Q8. How you would identify referral needs and provide information about CCF & MB's relevant products and services.
Q9. How you would secure interviews with referral business so that the needs of clients can be met. (1,000 words).
Assignment Task 2: Growing the business
Having considered how you would go about building and nurturing relationships, Peter and Jill now require you to turn your attention to marketing and promoting CCF & MB's business. This requires you to develop, implement, monitor and adjust a Marketing Plan for the business. When doing this, you will need to:
Ensure your plan is developed in line with CCF & MB's vision statement.
Conduct some research (or make assumptions) and identify key market data for the plan. This can include, for example, customer demographics, product types (i.e. census data if available), marketing media data (i.e. social media).
Identify of target markets, using a combination of research and your own personal experience.
Identify your major competitors (at least two) with a competitor analysis developed for each competitor.
Conduct a review of CCF & MB's current market position based on your research findings in conjunction with competitor analysis; and identify where improvements can be made.
Document changes you could introduce to improve the brand of CCF & MB, and what promotional activities you could introduce to build the customer base.
The provision of options for increasing yield per existing client.
Assignment Task 3: Identifying risk and applying risk management processes
Peter and Jill have become very concerned about the potential risks that could jeopardize CCF & MB's business operations. They were very impressed with your growth and marketing plans for CCF & MB so they have now moved you into more of a general manager's role with expanded responsibilities, including managing CCF & MB's risk.
1. As part of your new responsibilities you are required to develop a risk management plan which:
Establishes the context for CCF & MB's risk management plan.
Lists and explains the tools you will use in assessing the risks you identify.
Identifies the stakeholders you would consult in establishing context and the tools you would use in identifying CCF & MB's risks.
Identifies at least two risks that CCF & MB could face for each of the six categories of business risk including strategic risks, compliance risks, financial risk, operational risks, market and environmental risks and reputational risks with an appropriate risk statement for each identified risk.
Note: You may make any assumptions in producing your plan, but these should be documented either in the body of your plan or separately before you produce it. You are not permitted to simply answer the points detailed above.
2. Refer to the email from co-worker identifying potential risk in the toolbox. Using the box below, write an email to management outlining the identified risk, your analysis, how you would evaluate the risk and suggest how the risk could be best treated.
3. Refer to the Risk treatment mapping guide in the toolbox. Using the following steps, complete the Risk evaluation and treatment table below:
Step 1: Through analysis, identify the risks CC & MB's business may face; and complete that column. This is to include both legislative and financial risks.
Step 2: By using the Risk treatment mapping guide in the toolbox, appraise the likelihood and consequence for each risk identified and include these in the table.
Step 3: Define how each risk can be treated, and whether a potentially serious risk should be escalated to management.
Step 4: Develop recommendations to mitigate identified risks.
Step 5: Provide recommendations on how to monitor and review the risks identified.
Assignment Task 4: Improving the business
Over the last few months business for CCF & MB has been very good with a number of new clients coming on board as a result of implementing your business growth and marketing plans. However, neither you nor the business owners are satisfied with maintaining the status quo; as you and they are committed to a program of continuous improvement.
You all feel that CCF & MB's competitive advantage needs to be strengthened and a SWOT should be undertaken to establish CCF & MB's strengths and weaknesses including benchmarking the business against the industry. You now decide that you will carry out a diagnosis of the business including a SWOT analysis and a benchmarking exercise to improve CCF &MB's competitive advantage and its business. You are to produce a document covering your diagnosis, which will be distributed amongst CCF & MB's key personnel.
As a minimum, your document should cover the following:
1. The data you have used as part of your diagnosis to identify CCF & MB's competitive advantage.
2. A SWOT analysis to identify CCF & MB's strengths and weaknesses, its threats and opportunities.
3. How you identified and sourced relevant benchmarking data.
4. How you selected the key indicators (and who you consulted with) for your benchmarking exercise.
5. A consolidated list of the areas for improvement you have identified with a cost-benefit ratio established for each of them.
6. Recommendations on the changes that may be required that will affect existing workflows or CCF & MB's organizational structure.
7. A high-level action plan that will implement and monitor the recommended changes to be made.
Assignment Task 5: Managing people performance
One of your key responsibilities as general manager is to develop and implement ways to improve the performance of CCF & MB's consultants and other staff members.
Answer the following questions:
Q1. Why is it important to consult with stakeholders when allocating work? What are the possible consequences of allocating work without consultation?
Q2. Describe the process you might follow when developing quantitative and qualitative performance criteria. You should explain how you ensure that the criteria relates to CCF & MB's objectives and how to motivate staff members to achieve these objectives.
Q3. Describe the different ways you might gather information about a staff member's workplace performance.
Q4. What are the benefits of evaluating and monitoring staff members on a continuous basis?
Q5. Describe how you might do this for CCF & MB.
Q6. Why is it important to document the performance management process? Explain the possible consequences of not retaining appropriate records of this process.
Q7. In what ways can you reinforce excellence in work performance through recognition and continuous feedback? In what ways might you be able reward staff in non-financial ways?
Q8. Design a high-level performance management process for CCF & MB to be rolled out to all staff members.
Q9. Who should you consult when designing the performance management process? List who you would consult and the reasons why.
Q10. Using the box below, create a minimum of 5 evaluation criteria, that could be used in a Performance appraisal Checklist.
Q11. Using the "Work Plan" template provided below, develop a work plan for CCF & MB. This can be done by using actions of your choice (i.e. nurturing leads to create clients). The work plan will also include who you will allocate various tasks to achieve the plan's objective. The plan must be within CCF & MB's organizational requirements and comply with legal requirements.
Martin and Luis are working together on project involving the preparation for a loan application for one of CCF & MB's most influential clients, a property developer. Martin missed a deadline and the whole project is now behind schedule by a week. This is the third time in a month that he has missed a deadline. Martin has had problems with meeting deadlines in the past and has already had a written warning.
As the general manager you have been monitoring Martin's performance over the past month, providing informal feedback about his role in the project. Although he has made several improvements regarding his performance, his inability to meet deadlines has forced the delay of the client's development a further month. CCF & MB made a commitment to the client that the loan application would be with the prospective lender two weeks ago.
The client is not happy that he does not yet have an approval and is considering cancelling the agreement he has with CCF & MB and going elsewhere.
Q12. You have arranged to meet with Martin to talk about the project and his input. How would you go about providing constructive feedback to Martin?
Q13. Following your meeting with Martin you have decided to monitor his performance for the purposes of evaluating where improvements can be made and provide feedback. Outline the process you have adopted to conduct this monitoring exercise. Reference material is available in Topic 1.3, Business Management Skills, People management.
Q14. Following your meeting with Martin, use the evaluation criteria, you developed in question 10 above to record and document comments regarding Martin's performance in the Performance Appraisal checklist below.
Assignment Task 6: Showing leadership in the workplace
Leadership is defined as the ability to influence others. This assessment task requires you to reflect on your own ability to positively influence others in the workplace and the negative aspects of poor leadership.
Note: If you are not currently working in the finance and mortgage broking industry, you may reflect on your experiences in another industry.
1. Reflect on a situation where you have had a positive impact in the workplace. Please include the skills, decisions and/or behaviours you demonstrated that contributed to this positive change and what the impact was for the team/clients/organisation. (400 words)
2. Reflect on a situation which was or could have been damaging to an organisation. Please include the behaviours, standards or values that were demonstrated and explain why they were detrimental. (400 words)
3. In your role as the general manager of CCF & MB create your own personal performance plan.
You may use your own personal performance plan or alternatively you can use the example below. In developing your personal performance plan, you should ensure that your personal KPIs reflect
CCF & MB's goals and objectives and how you can help in building CCF & MB's integrity and credibility.
You may refer to the Organisational standards and values document located in the toolbox and use the Client service standards statement for specific development objectives.
4. Feedback from colleagues, staff and management may be gathered informally and formally including performance review feedback. Why is it important to analyse and interpret this type of feedback? (400 words).
Assignment Task 7: Standards and values
1. Refer to the Organisational standards and values document located in the toolbox and identify two of standards and two values that would be important to CCF & MB.
2. Prepare a brief employee performance review of yourself in a current or previous workplace.
In the performance review:
- Include the standards and values that you listed in question 1
- Evaluate your own behaviour and performance against these standards and values
- Explain how you could adjust your performance in the workplace to meet these standards and values.
Note: If you are not currently working in the financial services industry, you can choose another industry.
You are only required to write 2-3 paragraphs maximum in your response.
3. CCF & MB provides an internal blog (through their intranet) for staff to make suggestions to improve business performance. In your role as the general manager at CCF & MB and following work preparing a performance plan you observed that client service standards were not being maintained consistently. Failure to meet these standards may be damaging to the reputation of the organisation.
Use the internal blog (box below) as a communication tool and post a question to the sales team at CCF & MB asking why service standards and values are not being maintained consistently as required by the organisation.
Refer to the Organisational standards and values document located in the toolbox and use the Client service standards statement to prepare your question.
Assignment Task 8: Develop a performance plan
For CCF & MB to continue to meet their primary goal of being a leader in offering broking services to the local community, they have asked you in your capacity as the newly appointed general manager to develop a performance plan and establish some 'key performance indicators' (KPIs) for all customer service staff.
The objective of the performance plan is to focus on the organisations key goals and objectives in line with 'Service standards statement' available in the toolbox.
Information on people performance can be sourced from Business Management Skills, Topic 1-3, People management.
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