busines assessment

Assessment Task

CASE STUDY – Promoting Innovation in a Team

Read the following letter to all staff by the CEO of a large corporation and answer the questions that follow.

Letter to all staff: Stephen Kingsley, CEO, AQY Worldwide

Dear staff members,

I am proud to make an announcement about work that has been done in our Dunston office. This work will benefit the entire company for many years to come.

A small group of people headed by Mary Samuels, has been working on the Community Connect project. It started out as an idea by Shona Cjengla, who sought a more environmentally friendly way to dispose of paper waste. It ended up as a major project that saw our organisation lead a town into a major recycling enterprise. The knowledge gained through this project will be adopted by recycling agencies worldwide.

On Friday 25 march at 12 noon we will all stop work for 15 minutes to celebrate the success of the Community Connect team. All our offices will be linked via video to the Dunston office where I will present Mary and her team with an award as a small gesture of recognition. After that, Mary and her team and I will attend a lunch with local business dignitaries.

This project has not been without its challenges including opposition from the wider community related to cost and reluctance from the local council in terms of recycling management. The list goes on. However, getting feedback from individual staff and clients was perhaps the biggest boost to the whole enterprise. After all, if people at the ground floor weren’t willing and able to cooperate, success would have been unlikely. Shona took a pivotal role in this, taking the time to interview people and get their views and ideas about what was working and what was not. Without this effort, we could not have achieved the success we see today. Through tenacity, employing best practice principles, using the advice of experts and after spending many hours in negotiation and working towards consensus, Mary and her team can now be proud of their achievement.

We at AQY Worldwide should feel proud of our team and our successes. Mary and her team have reminded us how innovation can bring about change and improvement to an organisation, a community and its people. AQF Worldwide encourages innovation and welcomes more of it.

1. How did the Community Connect team identify opportunities for improvement?

2. What feedback did the team gather and what uses did it make of it?

3. How do you think the team faced the challenges?

4. What efforts might have been required to enable the team to successfully meet these challenges?

5. What risks were taken by the team in this project?

6. Provide feedback on how effectively, in your view, success was celebrated. How appropriate was it to the occasion? What else might have been done? What might have been done differently?