Section 1

Identification of tools and techniques

The project puts its focus on the consultancy project management for guiding postgraduate students in collaboration between two educational institutions. The chosen case scenario explains the experience of an occupational therapist of “NPP occupational therapy limited”. The assessment concentrated on the several measures and principles the company follows while scheduling their services. Occupational therapy deals with patients’ physical, mental and cognitive issues making them regain all independence of their lives. In this regard, a SWOT analytical tool is used to explain the internal environment of the chosen company and PESTEL tool is used to describe its external environment. 

Internal environment

Strengths

The company comes up with a huge range of OT options to their clients. The target is to serve individuals with physiotherapy, psychology, speech and language therapy and much more (Monclus and Tarrès, 2016). Along with this, NPP offers rehabilitation services to brain-injured patients, dysfunction and neurological patients. This huge range of OT services is one of the biggest strengths of the company. NPP makes their service ethics very clear to their staff so that they can provide their best services to their clients. Excellent staff behaviour, quick service and extensive care treatment push patients to avail their services more. The company has established its good reputation not just within clients but also within the staff. The two-way communication and relaxing office hours make their staff work within a comfortable workplace environment. Well-programmed management and trainee staff are the two most beneficial Aras of this company doing their business to run successfully.

Weaknesses

The flat organisational structure is one of the greatest weaknesses of this company. This structure is often good as this provides enough freedom to work; however, this is also responsible for creating major drawbacks resulting in a poor governance system. The company does not have any social media handle, which is another major weakness. NPP can gain the attention of more care seekers if they are active on social media platforms. This area is a huge drawback for them, resulting in poor marketing of their OT services (Kwak et al. 2017) 

Opportunities

The pandemic situation has provided them with a good opportunity to support their patients with good medical service. More patents have availed their service in this situation. This has increased their opportunity to make them more aware of occupational therapy and its power to support people to handle their fear within this pandemic situation. The director had noticed a plethora of misinformation that has been spread on social media about this disease, which requires to be prevented by NPP. 

Threats

Coronavirus has lowered business’s productivity as most of the staff prefer to stay at home during this situation. Even the authorities have to take strict steps to close their service for some time as Coronavirus spread within their institution can impact on their regular rehab patients. 

External environment analysis 

Political, environmental, social, technological, economical and legal factors affect this company’s business reputation hugely. PESTEL analysis is designed to show the positive and negative influence on the company’s business and external position. 

Table 1: PESTEL analysis

(Source: Self-created)

Analysis of the company’s strategic position

Leadership and communication

The company follows a democratic leadership style to manage its workforce. This working style allows them to prioritise their employees’ opinion while adopting any decision and changes (Fiaz, Su and Saqib, 2017). The director of the company takes proper care of each employee’s job satisfaction and motivates them to provide their best services to their care seekers. Innovative ideas and creative working capabilities are always appreciated in NPP. the director always appreciates their employees to have their own goals and supports them to achieve that career landmark. The target is to make a happy workforce for staff as they are the fuel of the business. Unhappy medical professionals cannot serve their patients with expected service. Staff can share their thoughts and opinions by taking part in two-way communication. NPP always grooms and supports their employees to grow in their life. 

Company’s culture including ethical and value-based 

The company tries to maintain an innovative and creative culture within their service. The director appreciates the continuous development of employees and concentrates creation of systematic workplace culture. Good ethical values are observed to serve care seekers. Staff are selected as per their skills and qualities. Diversified workplace culture is maintained within occupational therapy centres. Employees receive proper training and motivation to strengthen their skill. Good services are provided to the patients. Staff are instructed to provide proper care to their clients so that they do not feel uncomfortable or demotivated due to their mental and physical condition. Safety measures are prioritised at first. The institute has an influential environment for decision-making, problem-solving and critical thinking (Fiaz, Su and Saqib, 2017). 

Company’s position within the sector 

The company has a decent place in the healthcare sector. It has maintained a well-known market of occupational therapy for four long years. The institution is famous for there are a variety of services such as speech and language therapy psychology therapy physiotherapy and much more. Mainly the care providers offer their patients to avail rehabilitation services. In a nutshell, the company comes up with integrated occupational therapy services under a single roof. 

Critical evaluation of strengths and tools’ limitations

As per the swot analysis, it is seen that the current pandemic situation creates major issues for the company to spread its business. It makes it difficult for the staff to continue their service and even pushes individuals staying in rehab to leave NPP out of fear (Johnson et al. 2020). On the contrary, this situation increases opportunities for NPP to spread awareness among people about this virus spread. Use of a variety of occupational therapies and an elongated service area are strengths of the company without any doubt. 

The section has used short and PESTEL analysis to judge companies internal and external environments. The sword analysis comes up with a very limited area, while the PESTEL model discusses general topics of health centres rather than focusing on the company. However, the SWOT analysis has provided a deep understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the company in the coronavirus pandemic situation. The PESTEL analysis has highlighted every six external factors that impact on the company’s business very clearly. 

Client needs 

The client needs to promote their business and social media platform. This is one of the topmost priorities of NPP at this stage of business marketing. They must come up with specific decisions to run their business successfully within this crisis period (Moren et al. 2020). They cannot afford to make any loss and lose employees. The client needs to make adequate implementations to improve their organisational structure. 

Main issues of the company

The company has certain issues, as discussed above. Some of them are as follows, 

• The company does not have any social media accounts on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. this is a huge issue for the company to market their service and OT products (Kwak et al. 2017)
• The current pandemic situation has created another issue for the company, which requires it to be solved as early as possible. 
• Staff have started to leave their job out of fear, and rehabilitated clients have preferred not to avail their service during this period. This has resulted in a huge business loss resulting in reduced productivity and profitability. 

Identification of improvement

1. Maintaining the social media site is not a very difficult task. Companies need to build their social media reputation to reach maximum clients. Especially in a pandemic situation, social media is the only way to reach clients as physical contact is not appreciated during this time. The director can recruit staff to maintain their social media handle and update the account as per the requirement.
2. More technological advancements can be made within the. Use of IoT-based tools skin makes it easier for the staff members to maintain no-contact services. This will be easy for this stuff and management team to maintain all protocols of social distancing (Moren et al. 2020).

Section 2

Recommendations on the company’s needs 

Section 1 has provided a detailed understanding of companies. As per the analysis, some specific and general difficulties of maintaining good service have been detected. Recommendations are made to provide the company with a suitable solution in regards to them. Three recommendations are provided to and NPP, which will be helpful for the firm to improve its service loopholes during the crisis period (Rogers et al. 2017). 

Recommendations 1

The first recommendation can be made of maintaining a social media handle for business marketing. In this competitive world, business marketing comes as a priority for the institutions. Directors cannot afford to lose any client of the targeted market to some rivals. In the social media page, they are required to put detailed data of their services with imagery description. The director must recruit position to handle social media activities and clients to query in social media. As in this pandemic situation and clear their queries about any service, they must have interacted with them by social media handles. The social media managers duty will be to input all the service details in that page and provide clients with all service-related answers. A digital content creator must be hired to structure and design the page. Proper innovative tools and creative mindset need to be applied while designing the posters, facility lists, service lists and much more. They must have started an online booking policy and online payment system as well by the use of social media platforms. Donation and funding activities can be raised by these sites as well. The director can ask for financial help to government-assigned NGOs from their official social media page. Apart from that, NPP can create an awareness program from these pages any false information about any service (Radder et al. 2017). 

Recommendation 2

The director has stated their leadership style and employee appreciation policies. However, he has not mentioned anything about the reward system. Both monetary and non-monetary appreciation is important from an employee’s perspective.  The environment is helpful for its staff. However, they need some elements that can influence them to work proactively. Promotion, incentives and awards can be helpful for them to get motivation. These act as a fuel to improve employees’ performance and boost up their energy to work harder. The director must have involved their employees to take part in influential games and innovative workplace activities such as brainstorming and much more. These are helpful to entertain staff members so that they do not get bored serving patients regularly. Some motivational patients must be arranged for staff members to encourage them. Daily feedback policy e is helpful. However, that can be integrated with reward policies. 

Recommendation 3

Technological advancements can be made within the institution to serve patients. Use of artificial intelligence and adoption of IoT-based devices are helpful to gain this objective. Apart from that, they can make a separate word for their patients staying in rehab patience not likely to visit the centre out of fear of pandemic (Moren et al. 2020). This can make the game that courage to continue that treatment. This is an isolation room which will be provided to the care seekers with similar comfort and security as available rooms. This isolation room must be designed with proper social distancing protocols set by the UK government.