Global Business Management (Human Resources) BSc (Hons) - Completion Award
2 Years full-time or 3 years sandwich | September Start

In this module, you will learn about the role of a project and project manager in organisations and the concepts and techniques required to manage the core aspects of a project.

The main topics covered include the core knowledge areas outlined in A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) published by Project Management Institute (PMI) as well as essential fundamental theories, knowledge, and techniques required to manage a project in contemporary business settings.

These topics include:
• Defining project characteristics, lifecycle, and activities.
• Understanding how projects drive change and achieve strategic goals in organisations.
• Realising the role of the project and project manager in various organisational structures and cultures.
• Managing core project aspects, such as stakeholder relationships, scope, cost, schedule, and risk.
• Distinguishing traditional, agile, and extreme project management approaches.

Drawing on contemporary project management research and business case studies, this module will develop your knowledge, skills, and confidence in managing projects and your learning with take place though lectures and practical IT workshops. Your learning will expose you to a wide range of project management examples (successful and unsuccessful) and project management approaches (classic and contemporary) to broaden your understanding of project management in a dynamic business setting. You will be given opportunities to work as a team and develop essential project management documents for a chosen project.

On completing this module, you will be able to utilise appropriate project management techniques and technical skills to effectively and efficiently manage different projects and you will be able to critically challenge the assumptions and existing practices in project management.

Successive global and national crises and organisational failures have demonstrated that conventional approaches to understanding and managing organisations and their people are less than effective.
Transforming Self and Organisations will support you in developing alternative approaches to analysing organisations, people and work practices. Building upon the multiple perspectives that you have been introduced to in the second year of your programme and upon your understanding from the module “People, Management and Organisations”, a research-rich curriculum will enable you to develop your appreciation and application of Critical Management tools and perspectives which challenge conventional approaches to understanding organisations. Drawing upon tools from, for example, identity, aesthetics, power and culture, you will develop your capabilities for questioning the neoliberal status-quo and the politics of managerialist and performance-driven agendas. You will examine the practices of large corporates through to SMEs, NFPs and social enterprises, interrogating, challenging, questioning what is typically taken-for-granted, seen as usual and appropriate, to recognise the inherent power and control that exists, to propose far-reaching change within organisations and society that prioritises fairness, justice, equality, diversity and sustainability. Your learning will place you in good stead to bring about future transformation within organisations. In adopting these alternative Critical perspectives on organisations so this may also challenge your own assumptions, values and beliefs transforming yourself. This learning will be invaluable to your future employment, enterprise/entrepreneurial activity.

This research-rich module, Critical Human Resource Development (C-HRD) aims to equip you with the necessary knowledge and skills to develop as a critically reflective/reflexive, and capable graduate HRD professional, or manager, who can effectively and ethically facilitate the learning of others.
You will develop understanding of the contrasting ontological, epistemological and axiological bases of HRD to recognise the contribution HRD, and in particular, a critical approach to HRD, might make to organisations. Critical approaches to HRD embrace such organisational issues as power, politics, ideology and status. The module will, therefore, enable you to advance your understanding of how you might bring about change within organisations by discerning the tensions and complexities that characterise HRD, challenging and questioning assumptions, traditions and what is often ‘taken for granted’. Through this lens of power and control, you will:
• Appraise how gender, ethnicity, age, and other personal characteristics influence experiences of HRD interventions
• Examine the role of careers as crucial learning routes
• Examine the interplay of societal structures and individual agency that influence the efficacy of HRD to thereby evaluate the construct of identity as both a prerequisite and outcome of HRD
• Evaluate arguments for de-schooling and re-embedding learning within life and work
• Use critical and creative thinking in the design and evaluation of innovative, inclusive and emancipatory learning interventions

The module aims to provide you with an opportunity to integrate the knowledge acquired during the programme and apply this to a consultancy project for a real organisation. This consultancy project provides a vehicle for participants to develop and demonstrate key employability skills, to relate theory to practice, and to undertake a significant piece of assessed work commensurate with a capstone module.

You will work on behalf of an external organisation, which has identified a business problem or question, requiring a solution, working in small group of typically 4 individuals (you will select their own team members), participating in group and individual activities. The host organisation will provide a project briefing, and review; students will be supported by appropriate academic input and guidance from Newcastle Business School in the form of a mentor and via the Business Clinic.

The Dissertation module will equip you with the necessary intellectual and practical skills for undertaking an individual student-led, responsible, ethical in-depth investigation into an HRM or Management-related problem or issue of interest to you. Concurrently you will further develop key transferable, employability and enterprise skills including: problem-solving and analysis, creative-thinking, time and project management, negotiation, communication (written, aural and verbal), persuasion and influence, discovery, initiative.
The learning on this module is student-led, experiential and research-based with a focus upon you discovering, probing and questioning key issues. Initial lectures will though provide a refresher of the underpinning knowledge you developed at Level 5, necessary for undertaking individual student-led research. Associated workshops support you in putting this knowledge into practice for your own proposed research project. These lecture/workshop sessions cover the following topics: critically reviewing the literature, researching ethically, quantitative and qualitative research techniques, quantitative and qualitative analysis techniques. You will study on the same taught sessions as students taking the Management Enquiry module

Upon completion of the Dissertation module you will be able to:
• Conduct independent and responsible, ethical research involving the application and critical evaluation of appropriate theories and models
• Engage critically with relevant literature to establish a framework in which to analyse and synthesise the findings of your primary or secondary research
• Generate / collect relevant primary or secondary data using an appropriate and justified method
• Analyse your data using appropriate and justified method/s of analysis
• Recognise the ethical implications of your work
• Critically evaluate the source/s of your data and the method you adopted

The Management Enquiry module is a student-led individual project that enables you to undertake a significant piece of assessed work commensurate with a capstone module. The module aims to provide you with an opportunity to demonstrate an authentic engagement with managers and/or professionals from within HRM or Management more generally, and to integrate the knowledge you have developed during your programme to explore theory in practice.

The learning on this module is experiential and research-based with a focus upon you discovering, probing and questioning key practice-based issues. Through the module you will be offered the opportunity to develop and enhance key transferable employability/enterprise skills including: problem-solving and analysis, creative-thinking, time and project management, negotiation, communication (written, aural and verbal), persuasion and influence, discovery, initiative.

The module has five thematic areas; explore, review, engage, reflect and connect. These form the key elements of the assessed submission.

Part A (35%, 3,500 Words)
• Explore: Initial discussion a manager or HR professional explore with them the key issues that they feel they are facing in practice. It is expected that you will consider how you approach this conversation, drawing upon suitable forms of questioning and that you will provide evidence of the conversation, typically in a visual format, within the submitted enquiry report. From this conversation you will discern a specific area of focus for your Enquiry
• Review: Critical examination of appropriate literature to support your exploration. You will display your ability to critically assess and appraise the HR and/or management knowledge related to a specific key issue arising from your exploration.

Part B (65%, 6,500 Words)
• Engage: You will display your authentic engagement with the discipline problem/issue you identified in Part A, by collecting/generating and analysing live data regarding your identified problem/issue. This live data may be primary data (e.g. further interviews with, or questionnaire to, managers and/or professionals in practice) or secondary data (e.g. industry data). You will apply appropriate, ethically-considered, research methods and appropriate qualitative or quantitative data analysis.
• Reflect and Connect: You will demonstrate your ability to critically evaluate and reflect on the issues arising from your Management Enquiry. You will use the conclusions you have derived from your findings to develop clear contextualised, prioritised, well-justified, practical and actionable recommendations for change/enhancement/improvement to existing practice. This will include you demonstrating how the recommendations would potentially affect workplace professional decision making. You will demonstrate how you have connected and fed-back your key findings and recommendations to the participants of the Enquiry (usually the manager and/or participants).

A supporting reading list provides you with key references to enable you to undertake a more detailed and in-depth review of your enquiry. You will be expected to keep up-to-date with your project tasks.

In this module you will learn about the context of responsible strategic thinking, how to identify and explore sustainable business opportunities as a source of competitive advantage. You will gain an appreciation of the overarching principles of setting and executing a responsible and sustainable organisational strategy. Within the setting of these strategic objectives, you will understand how the associated responsible decision making will impact on both internal and external stakeholders. Your learning will span across private and public sector organisations, MNEs and SMEs and how each of different organisations and industries interact with the responsible and sustainable business opportunities and challenges.