CIPD - 5DVP - Developing Professional Practice

This document discusses CIPD Professional Map and conflict resolution techniques. It explains the 10 professional areas and 8 types of behaviours identified by CIPD. It also explores Tuckman's model of team formation and different approaches to conflict resolution. The document also covers project management techniques.

CIPD - "5DVP - Developing professional practice"
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CIPD - "5DVP - Developing professional practice"
Table of Contents
CIPD Professional Map.....................................................................................................2
Activity 1 The effective HR professional.............................................................................2
Professional Areas.......................................................................................................................2
CIPD Summary...........................................................................................................................3
Activity 2 Group dynamics and conflict resolution.............................................................5
Team Formation...........................................................................................................................5
Conflict Resolution.......................................................................................................................5
Activity 3 Project management..........................................................................................8
Project Planning techniques.........................................................................................................9
Problem solving techniques.......................................................................................................10
Influencing and Persuading others...................................................................................12
References.......................................................................................................................13
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CIPD - "5DVP - Developing professional practice"
CIPD Professional Map
CIPD was a standard developed by professionals in 2013 to determine best practices of HR &
learning & development professionals. It identifies 10 professionals areas, 8 types of
behaviours and 4 levels of bands of competence in professionals. The bands define the level
at which an HR professional stands. Band 4 reflects upon the senior leaders. Professional
areas include organizational design, organizational development, resource planning, L&D,
performance management, employee engagement, employee relationships, and service
delivery. Professionals can be categorized based on their behaviour which can be curious,
role model, decisive thinker, skilled influencer, courageous, driven, collaborative, and
credible.
Figure 1: CIPD (CIPD, 2019)
Activity 1 The effective HR professional
Professional Areas
Employee engagement, Resource and talent planning are some of the key professional areas
under band 2. People employed in employee engagement can be driven to deliver or courage
enough to post and accept challenges. Resource and talent planning requires skilled
influencers and personally credible professionals operating under band 1 & 2.
Employee Engagement:
Professionals involved in employee engagement are courageous and have the confidence to
speak their voice, communicating effectively even in not so familiar circumstances or
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CIPD - "5DVP - Developing professional practice"
conflicting situations. They can also be resourceful, determined, and focused on delivering
best to their organizations. An HR or L&D person in the employee engagement role should
also have the drive to deliver which is demonstrated by resourcefulness and determination in
a person. A person driven to deliver would set milestones, prioritize things, and establish
performance measures. Such a person is capable of creating clear plans, creating priorities
align with organizational goals, tracking progress, tackling issues, and maintaining
enthusiasm to deliver even in the times of difficulties. If person driven by goals is in the HR
role, he would be able to foresee things and prioritize HR activities to bring best results as
well as align the workforce with the organizational goals to achieve best results (CIPD,
2019).
Resource & Talent Planning:
Resource and talent planning is best done by people who are skilled influencers and are
personally incredible. A skilled influencer demonstrates ones capability to influence
stakeholders in gaining support and commitment. An influencer takes into consideration the
needs of culture, politics, and the regulatory framework when taking decisions. Such a person
would involve parties involved in a project to understand what they think when planning. He
is capable of understanding the cultural and personal differences between stakeholders and
the audience and can effective change his approach in managing the Impact on diverse
audience. If a person with such an influencing capabilities is put into an HR or L&D role, the
person would be able to take care of the needs of the culturally diverse workforce in an
organization and plan for talent and resource management in a way that satisfies most of
them.
CIPD Summary
A personally credible person is very professional and can bring great value to organizations,
peers, and stakeholders. A credible person brings both theoretical and practical experience to
provide advise to colleagues. The advise is often sensible and impartial. A credible person
would also seek advise from others, take feedback to learn and improve upon development.
Knowledge sharing happens and skills are transferred to others to carry the legacy which can
be beneficial to an organization as a whole.
Professional
Area
Behaviours Knowledge Band Activities
Employee Driven to How to achieve 1 Identify steps for
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CIPD - "5DVP - Developing professional practice"
Engagement Deliver organizational achieving goals
Keep track of work
progress
How to align priorities
with organizational
goals?
How to track project
progress and ensure
that issues are resolved
to ensure it is on track?
2 Set milestones and
establish performance
measures
Drive delivery of project
Track activity progress
and resolve issues
Courage to
Challenge
How answer questions
by providing
supporting evidences?
How to take into
consideration multiple
viewpoints and explore
solutions?
1 Understand issues and
clarify through
questioning
How to involve people
in developing solutions
to key problems in an
organization?
2 Consult with others to take
feedbacks and involve
them in the development
of a solution
Resource &
Talent
Personally
Credible
How to ensure that
deliveries happen as
per plan and the project
meets set deadlines by
working with managers
and colleagues?
1 Passes own skills to others
Gives advice to with
constructive criticism
Issues faced by
organization and how
to solve them?
How toe select the right
communication channel
for specific messages?
2 Identifies and takes
opportunities for new
experiences
Provide advice to
colleagues
Take feedback from
colleagues on improving
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CIPD - "5DVP - Developing professional practice"
HR & Development
practices
Skilled
Influencer
1 Identify points to
communicate the right
channels for
communication
How to tailor
communication to meet
needs of specific
audience?
How to make
adjustments in ones
behaviour to manage
influences on others?
2 Tailor communication to
different audience
Activity 2 Group dynamics and conflict resolution
Team Formation
As per Tuckman’s model, groups develop in four stages in any project or team starting with
forming during which purpose of the group formation is defined, objectives are set, and
expectations are determined. The next stage if storming. As the team members have just
begun working together and are mostly unfamiliar with each other and their respective styles
of work, conflicts can happen in this stage on ideas and roles. At this stage, everyone in the
team needs to understand others. As they keep working together, they start to develop
understanding of each other and then comes the stage of norming when team members start
to get comfortable with each other as they understand roles and working styles. They develop
trust with each other. The last stage is the stage of performing when the formed team works at
its best and works as per the assigned roles (Allen, 2008).
Conflict Resolution
While working together in a team, conflicts can occur and it is the job of the HR manager to
ensure that these conflicts are resolved at the right time without affecting that team morale or
the project outcome. Conflicts can happen due to many reasons. If a person has to complete
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CIPD - "5DVP - Developing professional practice"
an activity that is not congruent to ones needs then internal conflict can occur in a person.
There can also be conflicts between two people in a team if their behavioural preferences do
not match. Conflicts can also occur when some resources that are desired by all the team
members is scarce such that everyone fights for it. Differences in personal values, skills,
goals, and attitudes can also cause conflicts.
There are several models defined for resolving conflicts such as Khun and Pool’s model of
conflict which takes distributive and integrative approach to problem solving, DeChurch and
Marks model that works on activeness and agreeableness, Rahim’s meta model which takes
five management approaches including integration, obligation, domination, avoidance, and
compromise.
Maccoby and Shudder identifies five steps to resolving conflicts that include anticipation,
prevention, identification, management, and resolution. The approaches taken by them and
Rahim can be combined to forma framework for conflict resolution such that the final step of
resolution can utilize the different approaches identified by Rahim’s meta model (Krahn &
Hartment, 2006).
As per this framework, the first step to conflict management would be anticipation of
conflicts that are likely to occur from the information obtained. A prevention strategies can
then be made to ensure that these conflicts do not occur in the first place. Taking an example
of a project in which a team has to work on preparation of MIS for a newly taken project
which involves gathering, processing, and analysing order processing data across different
locations to feed into the system, conflicts can arise in case of mismatch of behavioural
preferences between two people. If a newly joined employee is a self-driven person who does
not like to be monitored but is put under the guidance of an older employee who is quite
dominant, conflicts can arise.
Going to the third stage of conflict resolution which is identification will get an HR manager
to understand that the two employees are not getting along well in the team. Once a problem
has been identified, it has to be managed by right intervention which could be through a third
person who is accepted by both parties so that both will listen to him or her. Such a person
can talk to both parties individually to understand their concerns and then devise a plan for
conflict resolution (Aston, 2017). The resolution can take any approach from integration,
obligation, domination, avoidance, or compromise. Integration needs openness in two people
to listen and work in coordination but it des not work then the HR manager would need to
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CIPD - "5DVP - Developing professional practice"
revert to other options such as obliging in which parties can be asked to minimize differences
by satisfying at least some concerns of the opposite party. An overly dominant person can be
asked to not be too intervening in the work of the new employee and new employee can be
asked to focus on delivery rather than on what the senior says. In this case, domination has
already been disliked by a team member and thus, the strategy may not work. Avoidance can
only cause the problem to escalate further. A mutually accepted compromise between the two
parties can be a way which can be made possible by an intervention from a third parson who
is senior to both so that both agree on certain points (Markgraf, 2018).
Patrick Lencioni also defines a model for conflict resolution and identifies five dysfunctions
of team that are required to be worked upon while resolving conflicts and these include trust,
conflict, commitment, accountability, and results. As per this model, trust is the basis for
achieving harmony and rising above the stages of conflict (PMI, 2013).
This model identifies a common cause of conflict as attribution error which says that people
view their own bad behaviour as circumstantial but others as habit. In the same way their see
their own achievements as a result of hard work but others as shear luck. If this error can be
overcome then it can lead to building trust in team members. Scrum is an approach where
reality is accepted and no one is blamed for anything. Instead, the system is examined and the
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CIPD - "5DVP - Developing professional practice"
cause of any failure is determined and worked upon to solve problems (Davidson & Wood,
2004).
Fear of conflict is another cause of conflict which is reflected by some symptoms in team
members such as boring meetings, ignorance of conversations, failure to understand all
perspectives, back channel politics, and personal attacks. With these symptoms, a project
manger would be able to understand the reasons for conflicts I the fear of conflict itself
(Allen, 2008).
The model also identifies barriers to resolving issues that can be individual personality flaws,
relationship issues arising because of unresolved past, distracting or misinterpreted
environment, and confusions arising from shared information between teams. An example
could be the previous example of new employee who may still keep working with the
company while conflict has been avoided and the two team members are put into different
teams to work on. If in future, the two are put together in a single team again, the past
differences will start to account again as they were not resolved earlier (Wick, 2017).
The model was found efficient in identifying causes of conflicts as well as the barriers
stopping resolution from happening. However, the model does not go deep into specific
strategies that can be used for resolving conflicts unlike the previously discussed model
which identified resolution strategies. However, this model as a whole takes a preventive
approach and seeks development of trust between teams so that conflicts do not arise.
However, this can be a challenging ordeal in practice. An HR manager thus needs to be
proactive while setting policies and defining roles, responsibilities, procedures, and methods
of communication so that trust can be worked upon from start. SCRUM is a methodology of
project team work in which a framework is defined for team members to work with each
other avoiding conflicts. The approach to conflict resolution is called Win-Win in which team
members are encourages to openly discuss problems and issues to work through them to
reach a stage of win-win for all. Attitude of cooperation and open discussion on any
disagreement so that a consensus can be reached upon are practiced in this approach
(CRUMstudy, 2017).
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CIPD - "5DVP - Developing professional practice"
Activity 3 Project management
An IT system integrator organization had taken a pan country implementation project from a
telecommunication organization in which a project team had to be developed for managing
the information assets. This involved creation of an MIS system by entering details of orders,
deliveries, and project outcomes as updated every day. A team was formed with each other
assigned some locations to work on and the data had to be reported every day. Each morning
would begin with sending reports on the latest updates and by the end of the day more orders
and information were to be extracted and added to the MIS system.
Project Planning techniques
There are some popular project planning techniques that include CPM, GANTT CHART,
Cause and Effect Diagram, PERT, and KANBAN. For defining the standard processes,
SMART objectives were identified, and processes for monitoring deliverables and evaluation
for performance were set (PMI, 2013).
SMART objectives that were set by the organization included:
 Statuses of all the orders received in a region managed by the MIS representative have
to be updated in the MIS system on the same day
 The latest reports have to be generated every morning and should be sent out
consolidated to the regional managers before noon every day
 All senior executives to follow the reporting format and submit reports as per defined
frequencies that can be daily, weekly, and monthly
The processes used for monitoring included creation of reports and sending of the same to the
regional managers who would review the reports coming from different teams in the region
and check them for accuracies. The employees were evaluated based on their capability to
retain correct data and submit reports on time. At the end of each month, a performance
report would be created on the basis of employees capabilities to update new submissions of
installation requests and new approvals of implementation of systems in specific locations.
Employees were to present the status of all sites as updated or pending in each category such
that the count of updated sites must match with the targets defined by the senior management
for them to keep the MIS updated.
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CIPD - "5DVP - Developing professional practice"
A sample of the status update report has been presented in the figure above. All the data
associated with each of the sites had to be updated on Company’s Project Management
System.
Regions Projects
Circles 1.8 2.3 850 Grand Total
East 3 5 191 199
Assam and North East 1 24 25
Actual Dates Missing for RFE1 Survey 1 1
QC Pending in Installation 19 19
QC Pending in Installation&Survey Task Incomplete 1 1
Survey Task Incomplete 1 1
Survey Tasks Pending 3 3
Bihar 42 42
QC Pending in Installation 40 40
QC Pending in Installation&Survey Task Incomplete 1 1
Survey Task Incomplete 1 1
Jharkhand 1 1 2
Survey Tasks Pending 1 1
Vendor Missing for Installation&Vendor Missing for RFE1 Survey 1 1
Based on the updates, report was created for each region recording the installations in each
circle and compared with the updated information by the senior manager. For a project report
to be accurate, the two reports received from two different teams were to match and any
mismatch would reflect upon missed entries by respective executive which would mark the
performance as low (Pennypacker, 2005).
Problem solving techniques
There are a number of different problem solving techniques available for project managers.
For the resolution of problems that were identified by the installation team in the case
included 5 whys technique in which involved assembling of a team, defining problem, and
then asking why questions with deductive reasoning to determine causes of problems and
then asking the question again to drill down deeper (Cliff Consulting., 2007).
A situation was encountered when a sudden notice came from top for changing the old MIS
system to the new one for which the data had to be migrated from old system to new system
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CIPD - "5DVP - Developing professional practice"
of project management. However, because of inaccuracies in earlier data entry, human
intervention was needed and much data had to be manually checked and then uploaded in to
the new system. This had to be done within a very small time frame with limited team size.
The problem was that the team was not efficient enough to be able to complete the work in
desired timeline. The 5 why’s approach was used for solving this problem in following way:
Team Gathering: A team of the executives who were responsible for data migration and
MIS entries was formed and they were informed about the objective of the team formation
Problem Identification: The problem was identified as the limited time with limited
workforce with which the project had to be completed (Markgraf, 2018).
Why questions:
Why are we unable to finish the tasks on time? Because individuals do not have the same
speed of delivery and some tasks are much time consuming
Why are people not able to work at the same speed? (Pincemaille, 2008) Because they vary in
their technological capabilities and their duration of work experience.
Why are some tasks very time consuming? Because they involve a lot of steps that have to be
repeated again and again taking time
Why does a person not have the same level of technological expertise? Because they come
from different backgrounds (Pincemaille, 2008)
Why do the time consuming steps have to be repeated? Because there is no automation
involved
As a result of this analysis, some remedies for problem resolution were recommended and
accepted later:
 As not every one in the team was effective and fast enough to handle work, the work
distribution was not done equally but based on the level of comfort with work. For
instance, a person who was faster was given more regions to perform entries as
compared to the new and technologically less affluent people in the team
 The repetitive tasks were programmed with macro that was developed by one of the
team member who was expert in programming and the resulting macro was used by
all the team members to speed up the work
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CIPD - "5DVP - Developing professional practice"
 People who were relatively new were guided by a senior member whenever he or she
was stuck to ensure that the work did not stop or suffer in any way.
Influencing and Persuading others
During the project of MIS, I was able to influence the senior by presenting flaws in the
software project management system that was causing work to slow down. I had given a list
of recommendations that were then taken by the senior to the developer’s team who improved
upon some of the suggestions. However, before they could incorporate my suggestions, I was
called by the senior to justify them and suggest how they would improve the workflow
processes or speed of deliveries. I showed them the data that I had gathered on time stamps of
submissions and persuaded them on the capability of my suggestions. When I had a skirmish
happening with a senior member in the company, we were brought together to come to a
negotiation and were asked to talk between two of us. At this time, I negotiated some deals
about myself ans suggested to reduce the level of monitoring as well as the load of work that
was given to me. The senior accepted my requests and also put some of his such as
communicating status on my own to him every day without asking which I agreed to.
RAPDAC model is a model of negotiation that is used by corporate. It identifies stages of
negotiation including rapport, analysis, debate, proposal, agreement, and closure. As per this
model, the two parties under negotiation must be made comfortable and analysis must be
done to understand both parties. Once this is done, people start to express their concerns
which can result into a debate. Post this debate, possible ideas of resolution are proposed and
an agreement if achieved between parties in negotiation. This model can serve as a guide to
deciding strategies for influencing and persuading.
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CIPD - "5DVP - Developing professional practice"
References
Allen, D., 2008. Group Dynamics and Conflict Management, s.l.: Yuan Ze University,
Taiwan.
Aston, B., 2017. How To Avoid Project Conflicts By Managing Resources Better. s.l.:The
Digital Project Manager.
Baguley, P., 2008. Project management. ., s.l.: London: Hodder Education.
CIPD, 2019. CIPD Profession. [Online]
Available at: https://www.cipd.co.uk/cipd-hr-profession/cipd-hr-profession-map/default.html
[Accessed 01 03 2019].
Clements, J. P. & Gido, J. .., 2006. Effective Project Management, s.l.: Thompson.
Cliff Consulting., 2007. A Systems Implementation Project Planning Guide, s.l.: Cliff
COnsulting,.
CRUMstudy, 2017. Various Conflict Management Techniques in SCRUM Process, s.l.:
CRUMstudy.
Davidson, J. & Wood, C., 2004. A Conflict Resolution Model. Conflict Resolution and Peer
Mediation , 43(1), pp. 6-13.
Heerkens, G., 2015. Project management, s.l.: Mcgraw-Hill Education...
Krahn, J. & Hartment, F., 2006. Effective project leadership: a combination of project
manager skills and competencies in context, s.l.: PMI.
Markgraf, B., 2018. Project Management Techniques in Planning & Controlling
Construction Projects, s.l.: AZ Central.
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CIPD - "5DVP - Developing professional practice"
Ohlendorf, A., 2001. Conflict Resolution in Project Management. s.l.:MSIS.
Pennypacker, J. S., 2005. Measures of Project Management Performance and Value , s.l.:
CBP.
Pincemaille, C., 2008. Prince 2: a methodology of project management, s.l.: Cork Institute of
Technology.
PMI, 2013. A Guide to Project Management Body of Knowledge, s.l.: PMI.
Wick, D. A., 2017. Leadership Harmony – 5 Dysfunctions of a Team – Conflict Resolution
Model, s.l.: Positioning Systems.
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