Special Planning Meeting

ENGL2001 Week 9-10 BVI Case

Special Planning Meeting

You work at West Indie Yacht Club Resort. You have been invited to participate in a Special Planning Meeting which will make a recommendation on management issues of the organization to Joe Kimball, president of WIYC.

Before this meeting takes place, you have been asked to prepare a brief report on the following topics. You must report on at least ONE issue below:

• High expatriate turnover

• Rising tension between expatriate and local staff

• Rising number of guest complaints
• Low employee motivation

Each of you please choose a role from the list below when attending the meeting.

A – Property and Marina Management

B – Operations, Accounting and Finance

C – Room Division

D – Food and Beverage

E – Engineering

The purpose of the Special Planning Meeting is to debate the alternatives, create the best plan to address some existing issues at the resort and recommend solutions to Kimball.  

The meeting will be organised as follows:

Round 1:

• all members present their proposed plan (strictly 3 minutes)

Question Period:

• all members ask and answer questions

Break (5 minutes):

• all members revise their proposals

Round 2:

• all members present their revised plan (strictly 1 minutes)

Discussion Period:

• all members construct final recommended plan

Recommendation:

• presentation of the final plan (strictly 3 minutes)

Writing Investigation Report
Adapted from Professional Incident Investigation TOP SET Approach.

In the body of the your report, include the following sections:

1. Aims & Objectives
Tell the reader what you were trying to do in the investigation (e.g. “The investigation was conducted to get to the root causes of [issue]”) and what you hoped to achieve by doing it. (e.g. “We intend, by addressing the root causes, to prevent similar and related incidents from happening in the future.”)

2. Incident Description
Describe precisely what happened, beginning with the initial incident statement and resisting the temptation to launch straight in with underlying or root causes or inappropriate detail. They come later. At this stage you should be objective. (e.g. Incident Statement - “Train ran off rail. Damage to property and potential injury.”) The Incident Description expands on that adding the rest of the detail which is known to be true.

Make sure you cover the Who, What, When and Where in your description, and add any significant and immediately striking factors which are known to be true.

3. Methods of Investigation
Begin this section by describing your investigation team: who it was made up of, their qualifications, their positions and anything else relevant about them.

Describe the method you have used to collect evidence. e.g. interviews, site visits, observation, people you met and time spent etc.

4. Findings
Present your findings in accordance with the TOP-SET headings is helpful to readers:

T ime, Sequence and History
O rganisation / Control / Responsibility
P eople and their involvement
S imilar events
E nvironment and its effects
T echnology, equipment & processes

5. Recommendations
Address not only the symptoms /problem but also root causes and individual contributory causes you found along the way; they have to be dealt with also.

For example:

Issue: Customer Complaint about Front Desk Performance

Symptoms (problems): No one picks up calls, long queue to check in
Possible causes:                 Lack of staff during peak hours, low staff morale

Add persuasiveness by giving reason (s) to your recommendation.

Tie in your recommendations to your findings and classify them under the TOP-SET headings/sub-headings, for clarity’s sake.

For example:

On Organization/Control/Responsibility

• Add extra manpower during peak hours (alleviate workload)

On People and their involvement

• Re-train front desk staff (improve work attitude and skills)

6. Conclusion

You conclusion wraps up your report and should include follow-up actions on how to implement the plan you have recommended.

7. References and Appendices

REFERENCE

Remember to add a full reference list of secondary information you have cited in the report. APA referencing style is recommended.

APPENDIX
You should attach, as an appendix, a clearly drawn root cause analysis chart. This will clarify everything you have said in the previous pages of your report. You can also include photos, news reports etc. as evidence but do not include more than 5 appendices.

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