Applied Management

An eight-week applied postgraduate course in Organisation Development provides student teams with an experiential learning opportunity to consult directly to real companies to improve their professional effectiveness. The course draws on knowledge and skills developed through the course of study, and prior courses in the postgraduate applied management programme. However, an eight week period of teaching limits the practicality of the students conducting a real-world Organisation Development intervention beyond the initial engagement, diagnostics, and intervention planning phases (Cheung-Judge & Holbeche, 2015).  With such a short period, the risk management practicalities for supervising a student team intervention in a business premises would be extraordinary.
However, the accelerated Action Learning framework conducted in this course enables the students to experience firsthand several Organisation Development interventions, such as team building, leadership development, and personal goal setting. In effect, the course itself is a learning laboratory organisation that improves itself through regular, weekly, self-diagnosis and continuous improvement, a ‘lived experience’ that the students reflect upon critically in relation to academic theory and best practice in their capstone Assignment 3. Peer assessment, both formative and summative, is one crucial tool that both raises team performance, minimises the risks of freeloading, and demonstrates the value of diagnosis-informed Organisation Development interventions at the team level.