Tesco employees: Personal and professional skills

This is the task 1 of the subject Managing Research Project and Presentation, which include the proposal of the project research which will be conducted as per requirements. From this task the requirements are to chose an organisation and describe the business case of that organisation, identify problems in that organisation and suggest a solution for the management of that organisation using the research and project management techniques, also state the negative and positive impacts of the suggested solution to the organisation.

Task 1.1

Selected Organization

As per requirement of the assignment I have chosen “TESCO PLC”.

Title of project

The Title of this project is “Improvement of Tesco employees’ personal and professional skills”

Tesco PLC

Tesco is the largest super market in United Kingdom. There are about 360 thousand persons working for Tesco in UK and they have their business in different parts of the world like USA, Japan, which makes the Tesco a prestigious business organisation. The Tesco stores in UK are of different range which includes from small stores to large stores like super market, travelling round the UK anybody will find the Tesco stores at different location at each city and town, and that’s the reason that 86% of the total sales of the Tesco in just from UK, and that’s why Tesco is considered as super market giant in the United Kingdom.

Business Case

At Tesco the human resource department uses workforce planning table to get an idea of the skills required for Tesco staff

In different organizations they use the approach of promoting employees from their current positions to higher position in the organizational chart, for that they provide extensive training and development opportunities to their employees. Tesco also practice the same practice known as “Talent Planning” which provide people opportunity to work their own way for the accomplishment of organizational goals. They also use “Employee Appraisal” as a tool for identification of potential employees and recognizing their efforts and work for the achievement of organizational goals of Tesco, the manages define the skills and competencies required for job roles and then identify what training and activities are required to enable those individual to achieve the target given in order to make them prepare for taking over the management positions in future.

What are Personal and Professional Skills

Personal and professional skills are those skills which are owned by individuals, personal skills are commonly by nature, but can be developed through certain processes and activities, when an individual use his personal skills for his organisational or professional goals / objectives, then it is referred as professional skill. The most common personal and professional skills are communication skills, management skills, interpersonal relations, innovative skills, analytical problem solving, decision making, social skills, pro activity and much more.

Task 1.2

Business Needs from project

In today’s business environment organisation understand human as asset to organisation business not like in past that people were considered as cost to the organisation business. It is very hard for any business to survive in the competitive environment without having properly trained and highly skilled (both personal and professional) individuals. So Tesco management is also dedicated to skills improvement of their employees but they understand that there are some weaken areas which can be addressed and should yield better results for both the employees and Tesco.

Task 1.3

Scope of Research:

As Tesco is a very big organisation with its operations in 12 different countries, so it will be very difficult to cover all stores of Tesco during this research because of the time constraint and available resources, so my focus will be on just 2 stores of Tesco located in North London.

Objectives of the Project

The objectives of conducting this research project are following

To gain understanding of the level of motivation that Tesco employees are focused towards their personal and professional skills development.

To identify the personal and professional skills level of Tesco employees

What are the available resources / activities for employees development at Tesco

What is the efficiency level of these activities

Are the employees of Tesco satisfied with these activities

How can be the level of these activities improved

How much Tesco need to invest on improving their employees personal and professional skills development

Competitors Analysis

Following diagram shows the main competitors for Tesco plc

C:PGDMS 2nd SemesterRizzucompetitors.JPG

The above diagram contains competitors of Tesco plc, some of them like ASDA, Morrison and Sainsbury are competing with Tesco at big level, and others are small level competitors. The analysis below shows the market share of Tesco and its competitors.

Type of Research

The study type of this research will be descriptive.

Research Worth

As this research will be focused on the identifications of obstacles in improving the personal and professional skills development of Tesco employees, conduct a research study and analyze the outputs, and on the basis of that provide suggestions and valid recommendations to the management of Tesco on how to improve their employees’ personal and professional skills. The list of beneficiaries of research include the current and future employees of Tesco, Tesco management and other organization providing outsourcing facilities to Tesco for the recruitment of fresh candidates for Tesco.

Methodology Used

To get data a questioner followed by interviews of randomly picked individuals will be used.

Sources of Data

In every research project / study there are two main sources of data, or we can say that there are two techniques used to get data during research.

Primary Data Collection: will be collected by questioner and interviewing.

Secondary Data Collection: This technique will be used to get any available data from books, newspapers and online resources.

References

http://www.tesco-careers.com/home/working/training-and-development

http://www.tesco.ie/csr/index.html

http://www.oppapers.com/essays/Tesco/178376?topic

http://www.eurofound.europa.eu/pubdocs/2007/1063/en/1/ef071063en.pdf

Tesco: Annual Report 2009

Speck, M. & Knipe, C. (2005) Why can’t we get it right? Designing high-quality professional development for standards-based schools(2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks: Corwin Press

Jasper, M. (2006).Professional development, reflection, and decision-making. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Speck, M. & Knipe, C. (2005) Why can’t we get it right? Designing high-quality professional development for standards-based schools(2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks: Corwin Press.

Task 2

Introduction

After proposing the project it is needed to identify the resources required for the accomplishment of the project and achieving its objectives and what are the available resources within the concerned organisation, the cost analysis of the required resources and setup the budget for the project. There is always training cost associated new systems to train the employees of the organisation to understand the key features of the system and make them enable to get achieve the objectives of project accurately and efficiently.

Task 2.1

Resources Required

To improve the personal and professional skills level of organisation employees is major concern for modern organisation, because to individuals can accomplish specific task only if they have certain skills or we can say that they are capable of carrying out the responsibilities of their job role. To make employees able to do so they need to be focused on their personal and professional skills development.

At Tesco sufficient resources are available for conducting the above stated activities; following is the list of available resources to accomplish the objectives of proposed project.

Human Resources: At Tesco the Human Resource Department is very concerned about the development of their employee’s skills level. They organise different training and development activities.

Balanced Scorecard Approach at Tesco: Tesco strives to give its customers what they need. This is what drives them towards success. To achieve this they have placed extreme emphasis on their marketing slogan – “Every Little Helps”. Based on this, they have identified two values which form the basis of all their actions.

No one tries harder for customers – to incorporate customer satisfaction at each level

Treat people how I like to be treated – managing its people well

Cost for the proposed project

As a very structured organisation and management system and the HR department is very focused on the skill development activities so the project cost will be very minimal as compared to the benefits that Tesco will get as outcomes of the proposed project.

Function

Cost

Planning of the project / Documentation and planning activities

£ 500

Cost of hiring skilled trainers

£ 6000

Cost of Arranging Training Venues

Nil (because Tesco already have venues available for such activities)

Developing training materials

£ 1000

Refreshment cost during trainings

£ 2000

Total

£ 9500

Part 2.2

Staff Training

As the nature of this project is improvement of personal and professional skill development through training and development activities, so there will be no extra cost associated with staff training, and all the staff training (for all levels of management and operational staff) cost is included in the above stated budget of the project.

References

http://ivythesis.typepad.com/term_paper_topics/2010/02/leadership-of-tesco.html

http://www.personneltoday.com/articles/2005/07/05/30654/supermarket-sweep-tesco.html

http://www.thetimes100.co.uk/studies/view-summary–tesco–132-359.php

Lockett, J. (1992) Effective performance management : a strategic guide to getting the best from people. London: Kogan

Marr, B. (2009) Delivering Success: How Tesco is Managing, Measuring and Maximising its Performance, Management Case Study, The Advanced Performance Institute (www.ap-institute.com).

Mullins, L.J. (2007) Management and organisational behavior. 8th edn. Harlow: Pearson Education Limited

Lueke, R. (2004) “Coaching and Mentoring”

Tesco Annual Report (2009) Available at: http://www.tescoplc.com/annualreport09/downloads/build_report

Task 3

Introduction

This task of MRRP is about the implementation planning and evaluation. The focus of this task is to provide an implementation plan with different milestones and make sure that all the stakeholders concerned with the project are properly participating in the activities and all the resources are properly utilized. And at the end describe the importance of monitoring and evaluation during the project implementation and how will you plan those activities for your proposed project.

Task 3.1

Implementation Plan

The proposed project is about the employee’s personal and professional skills development through training and development activities. In modern management unlike the old ages the people are considered as an asset to the organisation. Same is the case with Tesco, as they are leading the UK super market and have their operations in 12 different countries with more than 360,000 employees worldwide. To achieve their organisational goals and objectives Tesco believe in the skills development of their employees and they are investing a big amount on that. 7,000 of Tesco employees are working on the development program, and design special program to help the employees in company to get the knowledge and tools and updated skills to get their jobs well done, so I will suggest the management of Tesco to focus on the following points for the implementation of the proposed project.

Improve the training standard of the employees initial training when they are hired to work for Tesco

Create awareness among the Tesco employees for the improvement of their personal skills

Make the skills development activities attractive for their employees that they may participate effectively and efficiently in those activities.

As Tesco is investing a big amount in training and development activities, so they need to have a system of evaluation that how much they are investing how much they are successful in getting the results of that.

The management should help the employees in understanding the weak areas, and the skill they are lacking in, and organize particular activities (formal and informal) to help those individuals.

Tesco is the leader in UK super markets and indeed they are using much more technology to sustain their position in market, I will recommend them to have a research team who continuously focus on how to improve the standard of technology they are using in their organisation daily activities, and provide training to their employees on how to use the latest technologies available within their business premises.

Timescale for Implementation

It is quite important to have a proper timescale in which specific time slot is allocated to each individual activity which will be performed during the project time period. It is also important that there must have certain milestones to assess the progress towards the completion of the project. Following is the timescale for the proposed project

1st week

2nd week

3rd week

4rth week

5th week

6th week

7th week

8th week

9th week

10th week

Proposal and Approval

Requirement Analysis

Preparation for Training activities

Training and Development

Evaluation

Future Planning

Task 3.2

Milestones

Following will be the milestone in order to evaluate the progress towards the accomplishment of the objectives of the proposed project.

Have complete requirements for the training and development activities and areas which need to be given proper consideration by the end of 3rd week.

All the resources should be properly allocated before the end of 4th week.

Training session must start at the beginning of the 5th week and should be in such a way that having no contradiction with the routine duties of the employees who will be participants in the training program.

All the reports of the outcomes of training session should be ready before starting of the next training session.

There should be proper evaluation scheme to evaluate the outcomes of the training. And on the basis of that the future planning should be done.

Task 3.3

Monitoring and Control

The process of project monitoring and control includes information regarding the progress and the measurement of the achieved progress and how much resources are consumed. It is very important during the life cycle of any project to have proper system of monitoring and evaluation, because without proper monitoring and evaluation it is very difficult to achieve the objectives of the project which were planned initially.

In large scale project the automated systems known as management information system have changed the concept of monitoring and evaluation, these software systems are used to have automatically conduct the activities of monitoring by getting certain inputs from human, and then on the basis of that input they generate results which guides the project management activities in right direction.

The concept of status reports are also used for what is the current status of the project and how much progress is counted. For the identification of variances, Variance analysis system is used for corrective acts.

Stakeholders involved with this project

Following is the list of stakeholders involved in the proposed training and development program for Tesco

Customers: Customer Question Time meetings are invaluable. Staff hears customers’ views on everything from how we are serving them in our stores to our role in the community.

Staff: Staff gives their feedback through the Viewpoint staff survey, Staff Question Time sessions and our Staff Forum process.

Suppliers: Tesco core value is “treat people how we like to be treated”, and it’s something we apply firmly to our supplier relationships.

Investors: Tesco Investor Relation’s team regularly meets analysts from the financial institutions which invest in us or represent our shareholders.

Non-governmental organizations: Tesco management regularly meets with non-governmental organizations to understand and respond to issues of concern.