CMI 515 Assignment Example

CMI 515 Creating and Delivering Operational Plans teaches the skills needed to develop and execute an operational plan. This unit is designed for those in or aiming for middle management roles. It highlights the importance of involving stakeholders in the planning process and creating plans that align with the organisation’s goals. The unit also covers how to monitor and review plans, as well as how to identify and implement corrective actions when needed.

Cranleigh Environmental Limited provides household waste collection, street cleansing and materials recovery under contract to four local authorities in the South West, employing 620 people and operating 148 vehicles from three depots. Contracts specify collection frequency, missed collection thresholds, recycling capture rates and street cleanliness standards, with financial deductions for failure. The author is Contract Operations Manager for the two largest authorities, covering 380 staff. Organisational detail is illustrative and anonymised.

Introduction

Waste collection is an operation with almost no tolerance for planning error. Every household expects its bin emptied on a stated day, a missed street generates complaints to a councillor within hours, and the work must be completed within a fixed daylight window by crews and vehicles that are finite. This report assesses the relationship between strategy and operational planning, evaluates planning approaches, examines the legal and ethical factors bearing on a plan, presents an operational plan, and considers how delivery is led and outcomes measured.

Task 1: Understand the principles of operational planning in an organisation

AC 1.1 Assess the relationship between an organisation’s strategic objectives and operational planning

Levels of planning. Whittington et al. (2023) distinguish corporate, business and operational levels of strategy, each setting the frame for the level below. Assessing the relationship at Cranleigh, corporate strategy commits the company to retaining and growing local authority contracts on the strength of recycling performance, and operational planning is where that becomes round designs, vehicle specifications and crew training.

Translation into commitments. The strategic objective is to raise recycling capture from 47 to 55 per cent across the two contracts within eighteen months. Assessing what this requires, the objective converts into specific operational commitments covering container provision, round resequencing, contamination monitoring and resident communication. Mullins (2022) identifies this conversion as the point at which most strategies either take effect or dissipate.

Constraint running upward. Assessing a dimension often ignored, the operation also limits what strategy can promise. Materials recovery facility throughput and vehicle availability cap how much additional segregated material can be handled, and a bid written without that information commits the company to performance it cannot deliver.

Reconciling competing objectives. Assessing the practical function of the plan, raising capture rate and holding cost per household pull against one another, since segregated collection is more expensive per lift. The plan is where that tension is resolved explicitly, and a plan that claims both without stating the trade-off has not been tested.