Designing an Organisational Research Project: Challenges and Decision-Making Tools

Preparing for the Research Project

This assignment requires you to design your own organisational research project:

1. Apply decision-making systems and techniques in a group to interrogate and interpret a range of data analytics pertinent to a relevant contemporary organisational challenge.
2. Evaluate those systems and techniques to support effective decision-making in organisations
3. Engage as a team to present your findings in a visual, oral and written form that informs and influences the audience to make effective decisions in organisations
4. Support your argument with relevant contemporary literature including major resources from within the subject modules.
5. Diversity considerations may include: ethnicity; gender; learning styles; personality; decision-making preferences; work experience; first degrees; level of study (just starting/ almost finished); strengths; technical skills; values.

In the first 1-2 weeks, share your stories, and diversity, and summarise these in a table. Review what elements support high performing teams, and how each team member will support the project.

Prepare a project plan, and maintain records of meetings, actions (who/what/how/when). On a weekly basis, upload key points into your group space in Blackboard, and contribute to each weekly discussion forum as a team.

As a team, brainstorm project decision-making challenges you have experienced in the workplace, and which challenge you want to focus on to demonstrate effective decision-making as a team. Imagine you hold key roles in a medium-large size organisation. You will need to nominate your roles, and explain the operating context of the organisation (industry, location, size, products/ services/ organisation. Challenges may relate to understanding your target market for the launch of a new product/ service; recruiting highly qualified staff; acquisition/ merger; operations; manufacturing; logistics; information systems.

You will need to access a large publicly available data set relevant to your organisational challenge (Government Census/ polls/ surveys/ Google analytics). You will need to interrogate this data set-how were the data collected; how valid/ representative are they; how meaningful are they?

How will you use these data to support your decision-making for your organisational challenge?

Select and utilise at least three different decision-making tools to support your recommendations. Do these tools support each other, or suggest alternative pathways?

How can you create a visual representation of the data patterns/ trends to inform and influence your executive team to implement the recommendations for your project? Do not simply copy and paste – you need to create your own visualisation.

Your assessment response should make use of relevant, contemporary decision models and theories, team process and group dynamics theories drawn from academic research papers and articles in support of your argument .

You need to present as a team (ie, all members to participate) in a video / live presentation (10 minutes)in week 8; plus submit a case study research report that defines: the brief; the aims of your study; the scope; key research questions; team introduction and summary of team diversity; ^{Page | 3} literature review on teams and decision-making; use of data analytics; source of data, rationale for use; analysis, interpretation and presentation of selected data; discussion, recommendations; so what (significance of using D-M tools and team dynamics); list of references, and appendices to include team project plan, individual team process feedback and synthesised summary agreed by all team members.