CMI 524 Assignment Example
Research in management and leadership can lead to valuable outcomes like innovation, product development, improved performance, and better customer service, among others. Without research, businesses risk becoming stagnant.
CMI 524 Conducting a Management Project has been designed to help learners conduct management research that can positively impact organisational practices. Learners are expected to plan and manage a real project in the workplace or carry out an academic study addressing a specific business need or challenge.
Table of Contents
Introduction
I am employed as Deputy Operations Manager at Harlow Grove Care Group Ltd, an independent provider of residential and domiciliary care operating six registered care homes and two community based domiciliary teams across Essex and Hertfordshire. The group employs 486 people, of whom 312 are care assistants working across day and night rotas. My remit covers service quality, workforce planning and operational performance for the residential portfolio, and I report to the Group Operations Director.
The trigger for this project was financial and operational rather than academic. In the financial year 2023/24, voluntary turnover among care assistants reached 34.2 per cent against a group target of 22 per cent. Agency expenditure rose from £610,000 to £890,000 across two financial years, and two of our six homes received “requires improvement” ratings in which continuity of care was cited as a contributing concern. The pattern is not unique to us. Skills for Care (2024) reports persistent instability in the adult social care workforce in England, with turnover among direct care staff remaining substantially above the all sector average, and the Care Quality Commission (2024) links workforce churn directly to variability in the quality of care delivered. What was less clear was why our own turnover sat so far above both our target and the comparable providers in our region, and that gap in understanding is what this project was commissioned to close.
Learning Outcome 1: Know how to plan a management project
AC 1.1 Develop the aim, objectives and scope of the proposed management project
Aim
The aim of the project was to identify the principal drivers of voluntary turnover among care assistants at Harlow Grove Care Group and to recommend a costed, evidence based retention strategy capable of reducing voluntary turnover to 22 per cent or below within twelve months of implementation.
I spent longer on the wording of the aim than I expected to. My first draft read “to improve staff retention”, which the Operations Director rightly challenged as being an outcome the business already wanted rather than a project anyone could be held to. Maylor and Turner (2022) make the point that a project aim has to be specific enough to define what falls outside it, and my original wording failed that test. The final version does three things: it fixes the population (care assistants), it fixes the target (22 per cent), and it fixes the deliverable (a cost recommendation set rather than an implemented change programme).
Objectives
The aim was broken into five SMART objectives. Saunders, Lewis and Thornhill (2023) argue that research objectives should be capable of being evidenced individually, and each of the objectives below maps to a specific deliverable and a review point.
| No. | Objective | Deliverable | Deadline |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Analyse 24 months of HR, payroll and exit data covering all voluntary leavers (n = 107) to establish patterns by site, tenure, contract type and stated reason for leaving | Leaver data analysis pack | Week 4 |
| 2 | Obtain survey responses from a minimum of 40 per cent of the current care assistant population (n = 125 of 312) on the drivers of intention to stay or leave | Survey findings report | Week 8 |
| 3 | Conduct 12 semi structured interviews across current staff, recent leavers and line managers to explain the patterns identified in objectives 1 and 2 | Thematic analysis report | Week 9 |
| 4 | Benchmark current retention practice against three comparable regional providers and published sector evidence | Benchmarking summary | Week 10 |
| 5 | Produce a costed options appraisal with a single recommended option and a twelve month implementation plan for Executive approval | Final report and plan | Week 14 |
Scope
Defining the scope was the most politically sensitive part of the planning stage. Three items were deliberately excluded, and in each case the exclusion had a reason that I recorded in the project initiation document so that it could be defended later.
In scope: all 312 care assistants across the six residential homes and the Essex domiciliary team; voluntary leavers only; drivers relating to induction, rota and shift patterns, workload and staffing levels, supervision and line management, progression and development, and perceived fairness of reward.
Out of scope: nursing, ancillary, catering and head office staff; involuntary exits including dismissals, redundancies and end of probation terminations; redesign of the pay structure itself, which the Executive reserved as a board level decision; recruitment attraction and employer branding, which sat with a separate marketing workstream; and the Hertfordshire domiciliary team, which was mid way through a TUPE transfer and where consultation rules made research participation inappropriate.