Students will write a paper and create a slide presentation that describes the relationship, the communication process, and the challenges that exist between the human resources department and the organization’s strategic planning process. The presentation should be a topline summary of the paper; it does not need to include presenter notes in the slides; however, a reference slide will be required. The paper should be 6–8 pages in length, double-spaced, typed, and use APA writing conventions.

From a manager’s perspective, the student will analyze issues that face the human resources department viewed from both an internal and external environment. The student will demonstrate the communication process, the relationships that exist, and challenges that occur between human resource planning and the organization’s strategic planning.

You may propose an alternative project of your own design that shows attainment of the corresponding course outcome. The mentor must approve the alternative project.

This week, you will finalize your Project Risk Management Plan. You
will complete the items in the Project Risk Communications section.

1. Update any previous sections as needed based on instructor feedback or a review of the project information.
2. Create a communications matrix for communicating the risk
   elements to your project stakeholders. The matrix should include the
   individual stakeholders (who), risk content (what), method used to
   transmit the information (how), and the frequency (when). These items
   should be specific to each stakeholder. An example matrix is as follows:

1. Write a memo to the project sponsor, responding to the following questions:
   • Why did you choose either the agile or the waterfall method for your project?
   • Was the risk identification process appropriate for your project? Why or why not?
   • How did the quantitative and qualitative risk analyses help you
     in prioritizing the project risks and assigning numerical values?
   • What were some of the risk response strategies you did not use, and why were these not appropriate for the risks?
   • What are some ways that the risk management activities can be improved in future projects?
2. Update the References page, and update the Table of Contents to show the correct page numbers.
3. The deliverable length for this section is 750–1,000 words.
   Your completed plan should be 3,750–5,000 words total for the entire
   plan.

You have been advised by the warden that the agency is going to seek national accreditation by the ACA and that he has designated you as the accreditation manager. One of the areas that will be looked at is internal policies dealing with officer misconduct. There have been several incidents in the past in which officers have either been disciplined or fired for conduct that violated the rules and regulations of the agency.

He has tasked you with the responsibility of coming up with a comprehensive training plan that would address ethical and moral issues officers face in the performance of their duties. He also wants you to explore the possibility of instituting a civilian review board to investigate inmate complaints against officers. He assigns several other members of the agency to assist you.

• Research how various correctional agencies address the handling of officer complaints.
• Students should then address each of the following in 200–300 words each:
• Address the following in the comprehensive training plan:
  • How will the current level of officer misconduct be analyzed? Explain.
  • What techniques will be used to train officers in successfully and repeatedly making ethical decisions while both on and off duty? Explain.
  • How will these training methods and techniques be implemented in the organization? Explain.
  • How will the effectiveness of these training methods be evaluated? Explain.
• Each of the above sections of the plan should consist of 200–300 words each.
• Be sure to reference all sources using APA style

Please read posts of the two classmates. Offer at least one SUBSTANTIVE comment. Substantive agrees with supporting facts, disagrees with supporting facts, adds to the conversation with some new idea.

Student 1 Haley

According to Forbes, annual performance appraisals have started to recently get ditched by some major companies such as Motorola, Microsoft, Deloitte and GE. This is because these performance appraisals are too time consuming, do not significantly impact employee performance, and they bring down morale. Instead of doing yearly performance reviews, they are electing to do more frequent one on one meetings with managers. They believe this will still provide the necessary feedback, but also help keep employees on task. Some ways they proposed to fix the issues companies are having with performance appraisals is by having more frequent meetings, training managers how to evaluate fairly, and having employees set goals that are measurable.

Personally I believe there is little value to these performance appraisals. There is a lack of consistency in the way employees are reviewed and evaluated by their managers. There is room for unconscious bias, which could hurt the employees morale, not allow them to get a bonus, and could even cause them to lose their job. Also, what some customers are evaluated on are not measurable, giving way to more inconsistency and sometimes bias. For example, some companies measure customer service or communication skills. Lastly, some companies use these reviews to weed out the low performers. This is not an accurate way of evaluating who should or should not stay with the company since these reviews are not standardized and have many inconsistencies. Overall, I believe performance reviews are too inconsistent to be a reliable way to evaluate employees.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbeshumanresourcesc…

Student 2 Jeanie

My experience with annual performance appraisals is they can have good and negative aspects to them. If you have a manager that gives solid and objective feedback to an employee it can be an asset if the employee is open to hearing and accepting the feedback. In my career I have always been one that likes feedback and understand that high level managers do not always have the time, so the once a year sit down was always welcome to me. Others find the process bothersome and don’t spend any time to find if there are areas for improvement in their daily work. Over the years and especially the last few years there has been more and more discussion on how to move past the annual appraisal. One of the problems I see is the mixture of managers that are actually performing these tasks. The baby boomers tend to want to document and have critical conversations and the younger generation would like to use a “tool” that will help to speed the process and can be very assertive in providing feedback to employees.

I have found that once we get managers working in the same format of the annual performance appraisal we have another challenge of how they provide feedback. Some managers provide critical feedback and meaningful objectives while other managers will provide soft feedback because they don’t want to be the “bad guy” and give the employee information on areas of improvement. This can lead to an employee feeling they are doing a good job when in fact they need significant improvement or they may be listed as a poor performer that needs to be replaced. Just educating managers on how to provide the critical feedback is a step in the right direction but the company needs to have a good understand on the strength of the manager to do this appropriately.

In summary I do believe in annual performance appraisals but also think that managers need to be connecting on a regular basis to provide feedback. An employee should not find out once a year that they are performing or not. In looking for articles to reference I found this one on training the Manager to maximize the process. There can be a significantly important information gathered from the process that not only assists the manager with their team but also higher levels of manager to identify employees that may be a future successor to manager or an issue that an employee needs to be moved to another area. Training is another critical factor that can be pulled from the annual review that may otherwise be overlooked.

https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/hr-magazine/pages/1212-performance-appraisal-training.aspx (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.

The CEO and CIO in your company wants to propose a new information system that may have a strategic impact on the business. They believe that by gathering data on competitors’ customers, the business will gain a significant competitive advantage. You are the primary lead when applying technology to the business and you have been asked for your opinion about this new opportunity.

In a 1,500–1,750-word e-mail response, provide your opinions about an information system such as this. Be sure to answer the following questions:

• What would the advantages and disadvantages of the information system be?
• Identify the type of information system this would represent.
• What ethical problems might this type of system introduce? Provide at least 2 examples of potential problems.
• Address this type of information system with respect to how organizational decision making might be impacted.
• Does it matter whether the customers are individuals or businesses? Why or why not?

Make sure to use the APA style that and provide enough detail to fully support your opinion.