BSc Professional Management (CMDA)

• Identify and classify knowledge about management and leadership.
• Explore differences between managing and leading.
• Use the concepts of leadership and management to be flexible to the changing needs of the organisation.
• Practise self-awareness leading to the professional management of self and others.
• Adopt management behaviours (agile, professional, inclusive and responsible).
• Consider the professional practice implications of how these concepts are contested.

• Use data analytics and conceptual thinking to make better decisions, with an enhanced self-awareness of the assumptions that underpin them.
• Understand and embrace digital technology to analyse and present data, and use it to make decisions.
• Develop behaviours that show the importance of being both analytical and conceptual during problem-solving and decision making.
• Understand the psychology of decision-making, including decision-making bias, and the influence of power and politics. Understanding how values and ethics go beyond analytical and conceptual approaches is also included to ensure a rounded approach.
• Develop self-awareness of how technology, processes, assumptions and the structures of communication underlying decisions matter.

• Differentiate between accounting and finance concepts and how they are used in practice.
• Analyse the differences between accounting and financial management calculations, in terms of their impact on roles, sectors, action and performance.
• Appreciate the importance of finance and accounting as the foundation of ethical professional management through practise and observation.
• Appreciate the need to make interpersonal excellence possible between non-finance and finance specialists.
• Understand and observe how budgets are managed and how expenditure is controlled.
• Be commercially aware of their organisational role.
• Understand different managerial perspectives, situations and sectors (e.g. how might someone in marketing react differently to financial experts, or compared to an operations manager? Or how does an NHS accountant view financial risk differently from a venture capitalist?).

• Understand how different project management concepts, tools and techniques can be used in different stages and types of projects, in different organisational contexts.
• Assess project planning and delivery to maximise project performance (including management of risk, the development of collaborative relationships, budgeting and cost control and the transfer of learning).
• Develop and adopt behaviours that are conducive to managing complexity and change within different types of compliant and professional projects.
• Develop and adopt behaviours likely to increase project success in the future including agile working.

This module is part of a series of three, one at each level of the programme. At this level, the emphasis is on managing people at a relatively simple level.

• Select basic concepts that can help manage self and people in their own context.
• Develop behaviours towards managing immediate colleagues that are professional and ethical.
• Develop an analytical understanding of their context compared with other sectors, and use concepts to understand how managing people is linked to this broader context.
• Inquire into their own work context to begin to conduct reflective work-based learning.
• Adopt agile, inclusive, collaborative and professional approaches to their work for which they accept responsibility.

Students are expected to work independently, but also with guidance from their supervisors.

• Demonstrate evidence of significant engagement and achievement in the workplace through building a work-based portfolio.
• Develop a reasoned discussion and evaluation of the material presented in the portfolio as evidence of progress and achievement.
• Be conceptual, analytical and critical in the way they think and work, creating room for differentiation.
• Practise how to set, deliver and reflect on personal transformational goals that follow a professional and ethical code of conduct.

• Explain how Human Resources (HR) processes and practices support organisational performance and personal well-being.
• Understand the wide-ranging ethical dimension of HR, such as discrimination, redundancies, performance appraisal and health and safety.
• Examine whether corporate social responsibility (CSR) is part of HR Management (HRM), HRM is part of CSR, or the two are treated independently.
• Exhibit behaviours that role model inclusive, sustainable and ethical management, and use of diversity in the work place to create collaboration, rather than conflict and disputes.
• Work with HR to develop a high performance culture.
• Understand new challenges, such as how artificial intelligence will create changes in job roles and how technology, such as gamification can engage employees. This also includes the role of people in sustainability.

If you have a L4 higher apprenticeship in AMP, you will study this module and not -Professional Practice

This module forms a bridge between the higher apprenticeship – Associate Project Manager and the Degree in Professional Management and CMDA. It explores managing people beyond projects, with particular regard to knowledge about and behaviours to support how:

• Complexity increases when knowledge and behaviours are extended beyond projects to managing departments, across projects and functional areas
• Analytical and conceptual thinking can be developed to levels needed beyond projects
• Whole organisation finance and accounting is undertaken and used for decision making

It contributes to the programme level outcomes by allowing the student to plan their personal development to become a more rounded manager ready to manage beyond single projects. The students generate a self-development plan focussing on self-awareness and reflective practice to develop and evidence behaviours that are agile, inclusive and professional and involve more responsibility.

It contributes to the whole programme student journey by comparing managing and leading in terms of personal development using analytical and conceptual in the context of whole organisational financial, allowing students to progress to more senior roles.

If you have a L4 higher apprenticeship in operations/departmental manager, you will study this module and not – Professional Practice

This module forms a bridge between the higher apprenticeship – Operations/Departmental Manager and the Degree in Professional Management and CMDA. It looks at managing people and operations management as a function alongside a nexus of organisational improvement, risk management and decision making.

• Report generation and decision making using financial accounting information
• HR challenges such as workforce development, well-being, HR systems and legal requirements, conflict management and dispute resolution, adhering to a Professional Code of Conduct
• Operations Management especially regarding continual improvement,

It contributes to the programme level outcomes by focussing managing in a more cross-functional way through a deep consideration of people and operations generally and in terms of their role as a department/function. The importance of decision making in general, and in particular, in HR and Operations Management is emphasised as well as how decisions in one impact the other.

It contributes to the whole programme student journey by showing organisational life to require managers who are able to work with all functions and also bring elements of that functional thinking into relevant parts of their work.

• Analyse what their sector’ digital and new technology future is likely to look like and how many small steps, by leaders across all functional areas, will be needed to arrive there.
• Know and understand how to use leadership concepts to develop a leadership approach and identity aligned to the digital age.
• Analyse how the digital age provides opportunities that can be furthered using personal leadership.
• Practise acting as a leader to seize opportunities for innovation, disruption and growth.
• Work on their own leadership using the challenging context of the disruptive potential of digital business and new technologies.

• Examine how pervasive operations management is within an organisation and how it is driven by operational strategy. Understand how it is linked to technology and the digital age. Sustainability and links to pervasive marketing are also explored.
• Analyse the relationships between operations concepts and organisational performance, practices and individual behaviour, in a variety of roles and at a variety of organisational levels.
• Apply operations concepts in an organisational context, to develop collaborative relationships with customers and suppliers.
• Understand how operations strategy is linked to organisational strategy and is affected by the context of the organisation. Examine what both imply about operations management.
• Understand the importance of technology in automating operations and, in involving the customer in new ways. This is key to future-proofing students engagement with operations management.

• Know and understand how tools and concepts can help people manage creativity, innovation and change to deliver long-term purpose and performance.
• Analyse how social exchanges, interpersonal excellence and personal effectiveness lead to creativity, innovation and change.
• Practise becoming more creative, innovative and open to new ways of thinking and working to shape common purpose, generate customer insights, inspire others and generally deliver organisational performance.
• Use change tools and creativity techniques and embrace the complexity of making creativity, innovation and change happen in proactive and reactive ways.
• Link change to both technological potential and to psychological dynamics.

This module is the second in the series of three, one at each level of the programme. At this level, the emphasis is on the practices that take place at a departmental or functional level.

• Select concepts that can help access the complexity of managing practices at a departmental or functional level.
• Inquire into sources of complexity in how power, communication, culture, knowledge, learning and decision-making interact within functions and/or departments.
• Develop the skill of relating varying concepts to processes and their dynamics to generate actions that are reflected upon at a departmental or functional level.
• Show greater independence in selecting an area of their work to focus on.
• Choose an area of work that involves greater organisational complexity.
• Show greater independence in selecting which concepts to use and relate them to each other in more sophisticated ways.
• Use more concepts from different modules and more complex concepts

Students are expected to work independently, but also with guidance from their supervisors, and consultation with their teams.

• Complete a specific work-based project that involves a greater level of responsibility than required at level 4. Students must work on a project, more than individual tasks, which includes negotiating objectives and outcomes and their wider impact.
• Consider impacts outside of their immediate context. It is likely to involve professional judgement, dilemmas, and value conflicts.
• Integrate their thinking across modules and deepen their knowledge within a functional domain.

• Know and understand how marketing and selling take on different definitions with different implications for professional practice.
• Understand its relationship with organisational performance and future research.
• Analyse marketing practices and their impact from a variety of perspectives.
• Practise using analytical and creative thinking within marketing practises, at different levels of analysis and in association with customers or clients to build collaborative relationships.
• Explore how marketing has moved towards relationship marketing, away from transactional marketing, and what this shift means for selling.
• Take a futuristic view of marketing, critically engaging with how marketing theory embraces new challenges and the integration of digital technology.

• Know and understand methods and tools of organisational foresight related to digital business and new technologies, and how they relate to organisational performance.
• Analyse how trends related to digital business and new technology will affect your sector and organisation.
• Use organisational foresight methods and tools to embrace digital business and new technology given advances in robotics, virtual reality, artificial intelligence and other technologies.
• Embrace digital business and technological disruption through foresight, scenario planning and behavioural challenges.
• Consider what ethical challenges lie ahead as technology becomes more integrated.

• Know and understand strategy concepts well enough to critically integrate them in context.
• Analyse strategizing at different organisational levels to reveal the complexity, surface tensions and to promote ambidexterity.
• Practise embracing organisational complexity through integrating strategy concepts into professional practice.
• Generate insights that have both breadth and depth, are innovative and inclusive, and are impactful.
• Take into consideration how strategic complexity affects how they interact with others, are accountable about what they do and achieve, and how they role model professional strategic practice.

This module is the final in the series of three.

At this level, the emphasis is on the impact of organisational structure, design and processes and how that work is done.

• Select concepts to access the complexity of organisation-wide issues e.g. organisational structure and processes, and their effect on organisational performance.
• Use concepts related to an organisational analysis to adopt agile and other professional behaviours.
• Choose an area of work that involves greater complexity at an organisation-wide level.
• Show greater independence in selecting which concepts to use and relate them to each other in more sophisticated ways.
• Use more concepts from different modules across the whole degree programme.
• Move up and down levels of analysis e.g. from organisational to departmental to individual motivation and vice-versa.
• Critically engage in their progress using theory in practice.
• Seek to select concepts from more recent research.

As per the Work-based Learning that takes place at levels 4 and 5, students transform their knowledge of self and domain into action. The emphasis is on a module that is far less structured than the Professional Practice modules.

Importantly as this is level 6, students are required to collect primary data using a research method that they defend in terms of how it uses extant theory, how it uses an appropriate research method and how that data will be analysed along with other sources of data collected through inquiry. The impact of the project needs to be broad and deep and shared with others. Relationships between concepts used to conduct data analysis and generate insights need to transcend levels of the organisation. Action needs to behave purpose knowing exact impact will be somewhat opaque; embrace chance, change and uncertainty; consider underlying assumptions about others; bring the past of the organisation into focus for the future; explore the dynamics of people and their sense-making (Tsoukas, 2016). It needs to develop the behaviours of taking responsibility, being inclusive, agile and professional.

The module contributes to the whole programme learning by adding substantive projects into the portfolio that is research-based. It requires that students reflect on the challenges in generating new knowledge about management using primary data. It expects students to experience what it means to be a management researcher.