CMI DIPLOMA IN STRATEGIC DIRECTION AND LEADERSHIP UNIT 8005 Strategic Communication - MARKING SCHEME End of year assignment

t brief
You are studying at level 8 within the English Higher Education sector. At this level you are expected to have a detailed knowledge of your core subject but be able to create new ideas through abstraction of information from a range of unstructured sources to develop your own ideas and concepts for leadership models. In this unit you are concerned with strategic communication. That is to say how you should identify a strategic issue and develop your understanding of how to communicate this effectively using a range of media and communication channels. You can refresh your understanding of what the characteristics for this level is: Development of Knowledge and Understanding Cognitive/Intellectual skills Key/transferable skills Practical skills by visiting http://www.seec.org.uk/sites/seec.org.uk/files/SEEC%20Level%20Descriptors%202010.pdf The level of analysis required implies that you are working with knowledge at the forefront of the discipline. You should be able to demonstrate comprehensive understanding of techniques and methodologies applicable to the discipline. This implies that you are reading and able to use information from the most recent journals and understand the subject of personal development at a research level of investigation. Your unit has a comprehensive set of notes and resources available on the Institutes NETED system and the unit resources can be reached by logging into the site and being directed to: http://neted.bite.ac.uk/moodle/course/view.php?id=402 While you must respond to the Learning Outcomes and their associated assessment criteria you are expected to assume a role at director level, if you are not already operating at that level, within an organisation or its equivalent where you are able to apply specific leadership competencies setting the direction for the organisation and realising its strategic ambitions. At Level 8 you are expected to be able to demonstrate a detailed understanding of the context in which you are operating for the particular strategic communication challenge you have identified and the most appropriate channel to communicate your message. Therefore you are advised to prioritise and focus only on what aspects of your challenge that you deem relevant and undertake the necessary research of current management journals and other sources of theory and practice that will enable you to demonstrate knowledge and understanding at sufficient depth of understanding and abstraction to develop and deploy your strategic communications plan. In writing your assignment you should therefore research sufficient information to answer all the assessment criteria but within the context of a particular aspect of strategic communication with which you are concerned. The heart of this unit is your personal development and the context of your role within an organisation and the challenges you must overcome in identifying, analysing, evaluating and developing the skills necessary to be successful in delivering your challenge or strategic ambition.

Your personal challenge

This assignment requires you to identify a specific challenge you face in delivering an interorganisational strategic objective. Thus your assignment requires that you are able to choose a topic that enables you to achieve the Learning Outcomes within the context of a project working across an organisation. Identifying the business, choosing the context, scoping out the challenge and then identifying the skills to overcome the challenge and deliver a successful outcome are an essential component of the assignment should be clearly established at the outset. This means that while the overall project may have a number of challenges you need to identify one that provides you with sufficient scope to research the topic in depth and prepare your response. So you may identify a project that requires you to work with a number of other departments or subsidiaries to deliver some outcomes. You have to prioritise the key skills required to achieve the outcome noting your strengths and weaknesses. You can then research and define the management theory to support your analysis of the skills, the development of skills and the evaluation of how once these skills have been developed and deployed they relate to the successful implementation of the original project. It is essential that you select a particular focus for your assignment that allows you to research the current literature around particular skills acquisition. Ensure that in your research to identify the issue you wish to deal with that you can outline, before you start writing, how you will address ALL the Assessment Criteria in your response.

Learning Outcomes
You must read the learning outcomes as a group and understand the relationship between them and the tasks you set yourself to compete the assignment. Each learning outcome builds into the subsequent one and therefore it is easier to use one coherent project or task to discuss. There are two learning outcomes and associated assessment criteria for this unit:

Be able to ascertain the media perception of adopted interorganisational strategy Be able to evaluate the impact of global and ever-present media on stakeholder opinion

Each of these Learning Outcomes (LOs) have an associated set of assessment criteria. It is important that you prepare your answer such that it covers both learning outcomes and assessment criteria. All the LOs and the Assessment criteria must passed to achieve an award. It is not possible to pass the assessment until you have shown competency in answering every assessment criteria.

Learning outcome 1
1 Be able to ascertain the media perception of adopted interorganisational strategy a. Identify relevant domestic, national and international media b. Evaluate the importance of the media in influencing partners, opinion formers, stakeholders, customers and the public at large c. Evaluate the influence of pressure and political groups, and media owners, on the medias perception of inter-organisational policy and strategy

This Learning Outcome is helping to assess how you get your message out to the correct media channel(s) such as to enable you to understand, reach and influence your target audience. It may help you to ask some basic pre-questions such as: what strategy am I dealing with?, What issues does this present me with, What media channels do I need to use and what view of reality are you trying to project through your communication. If you do not ask these and other questions you will find it hard to develop your answer to LO1 and LO2. In order to answer the Assessment Criteria a, b and d above you need to be able to relate it to a particular strategy. You may find it helpful to apply Socratic questioning at this stage to focus on the precise issues that need to be addressed. It is asking you to be able to set out clearly what the context of your challenge is, how it relates to the organisation strategic ambitions and what perspective you are dealing with issue. Is it crisis in which case you might seek to analyse the Benoit stages it has gone through or what stance you are proposing. At this stage you may want to deploy stakeholder landscape analysis or draw up a Policy Influencing Plan. This requires you to be able to support your analysis with references from current literature from the last 14 months. In preparing your answer it is essential that you WRITE YOUR ANALYSIS IN SUCH A WAY THAT YOU ANSWER THE ASSESSMENT CRITERIA.

Learning outcome 2
2 Be able to evaluate the impact of global and ever-present media on stakeholder opinion d. Research and review the challenges and pressures faced by the media in reporting the activities which deliver inter-organisational policy and strategy e. Describe how to exploit the medias constraints and time-critical requirements to promote a positive outcome f. Assess and evaluate the inter-reaction between news, public and stakeholder opinion and inter-organisational policy and strategy

In this Learning Outcome 1 you developed an understanding of what you were trying to communicate, how you will communicate it and to whom through analysis of your stakeholder landscape and how to influence them. In this Learning Outcome you must now set yourself the challenge of defining how you will get your message into the media channel and gain sufficient exposure to project your message to your audience. This may require further Rhetorical analysis of your message and communication plans to fully understand how best to present and control the message in the media as well as being able to handle the response to you your message.

This will require you to understand how the media pick up on news and why it trends. This reflects the medias view of the reality it wishes to project to its readers or viewers and how it edits and presents this information to its audience. To be successful in this LO the topic you have chosen needs to be readily researchable and able to be analysed, particularly for 2c and 2d to be answered. Thus this accessible information should help you answer: which media picked up the story, how was it presented, was it for or against your original message, did you have to respond further, etc. In preparing your answer it is essential that you WRITE YOUR ANALYSIS IN SUCH A WAY THAT YOU ANSWER THE ASSESSMENT CRITERIA

Literature
You must use references from current management journals and management theory books that would normally have publication of not more than 14 months from the date of your assignment. Exceptions would be any seminal works within the areas of specialist knowledge with which you are dealing. AVOID using citations from previous students work.

Word Count
Your assignment should be in the region of 2,000 to 3,000 words, not more than this number. You must use this word limit to its maximum effect and irrelevant or descriptive work that is not key in making your point should be avoided. Try to avoid writing anything that does not add to your arguments and development of your analysis. Avoid describing processes rather you should be able to analyse why these processes work and what management theory has been developed to underpin this.

Drafts
Your tutor will review ONE DRAFT before you submit your assignment to ensure that you have approached your answer with sufficient rigour. You should submit your draft at least 2 weeks before the published deadline. SUBMISSION You must upload your response to this assignment by the due date and time using NETED the Institutes Virtual Learning Environment rather than hard copy or email. The upload site can be accessed from this page: http://neted.bite.ac.uk/moodle/mod/assignment/view.php?id=10719

Marking criteria
The marking criteria for the assignment are posted on NETED and are also contained in the handouts you received during your induction. These are the standard format for CMI assessment based on your answers to all the published Assessment Criteria such as to demonstrate, clearly, your competency in the topic being assessed. Please make yourself familiar with these and note that there is no numeric mark only a pass or refer. For individual learning outcomes Pass means that you have answered the learning outcome and assessment criteria fully. Refer means that you have failed to answer a particular assessment criteria within the learning outcome. The overall assignment is marked as pass or fail on the basis that you have passed ALL learning outcomes and completed ALL assessment criteria. ALL work must be submitted with a Turnitin report.