COMMERCIAL & CONTRACT MANAGEMENT
Introduction
The self-selected, self-driven reflective practice paper provides you with an opportunity to examine a real life commercial or contracting issue, which should lead to a discernible improvement in your performance and enable you to produce a tangible benefit as a result of your participation in the module.
The Reflective Practice Paper
Thereflective practice paper uses a dynamic learning framework to help structure the reflection process around your current role and responsibilities, including your professional experience to-date.
An introduction to appropriate concepts is used as the source of questions for reflecting on your current approach to commercial and contract management, resulting in various insights and actions that might be implemented in the future. Your selection of relevant literature, concepts and principles is a key part of the process, but whatever concepts are chosen, they should always be specific to your work role, thereby enabling the learning process to be self-driven and directly centred on your particular interests and concerns. To summarise, the whole process is about enriching your current knowledge and experience through structured reflection and clearly connecting the codified knowledge discussed in the classroom with the tacit knowledge of commercial and contract management in practice.
A. Delegate in Work Role: In this section you are asked to pose structured questions about your current work role, and appropriate prior experience.
B. Programme Concepts and Principles: This part requires you to research more deeply and fully understand the programme concepts and principles appropriate to your current and future work role.
C. Reflective Assessment: Ideas and Insights. This is about linking theory to practice and is, therefore, the core of the reflective practice paper where you are asked to connect components A and B to generate new insights into how your role can be performed more effectively.
D. Key Learning Points and Actions: This section summarises your learning through the reflective practice process and identifies potential routes for implementation.
E. Critical Reflection: This is a critical review of the process of preparing the reflective practice paper and how the experience has developed your competence: the aim being to identify what you will do differently in the future.
Implementation on the Programme
The five elements of the paper are scheduled throughout the module in order to balance your workload. Submissions (Parts 1 & 2) are cumulative in that the second submissions (Part 2) can be revised to incorporate tutor feedback on Part 1.
In addition to providing an assessment mechanism, the paper will support your professional development. Completion of the paper will aid the internalisation of the material delivered by the module within your current role and working practices. For your organisation, the paper will provide valuable feedback on the effectiveness of its current working practices and present action points for remedial action/intervention.
The notional breakdown of the effort between each of the five elements of the reflective practice paper is shown in Table 1.
A Delegate in Work Role
650 words
B Programme Concepts and Principles
1350 words
C Reflective Assessment: Ideas and Insights
1350 words
D Key Learning Points and Actions
400 words
E Critical Reflection
250 words TOTAL 4000 words