MHRM 6901 Week 1 Capstone Scope Proposal Example

Capstone Scope Proposal: Can Hartwell Baking Staff a Second Restaurant Contract? Choosing the Organization, Fixing the Question and Showing That the Evidence Exists Before Writing Begins

Student Name

Walden University

MHRM 6901: Capstone: Strategic Human Resource Management

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Capstone Scope Proposal: Can Hartwell Baking Staff a Second Restaurant Contract? Choosing the Organization, Fixing the Question and Showing That the Evidence Exists Before Writing Begins

The Organization

This capstone examines Hartwell Baking Company, a composite family-owned commercial bakery with three plants in Wisconsin, in Milwaukee, Green Bay and Janesville, and about 900 employees. Hartwell bakes bread for grocery chains and buns and rolls for restaurant customers. It was chosen for three reasons. It faces a real strategic decision with a clear HR dimension, so the capstone has something to recommend. Its size is large enough to have an HR function with records but small enough that one analyst can understand the whole workforce. And the information needed is available: Hartwell keeps turnover logs, job postings, a training budget and pay records, and its HR director has agreed to share them in summary form.

The Question

Hartwell has been offered a second major restaurant contract, supplying buns to a national fast-casual chain's Midwest region from a new high-speed line at the Janesville plant. The contract would add about 18 percent to revenue. Running the new line would require 14 additional maintenance technicians across three shifts, on top of a technician workforce of 58 that already loses about ten people a year.

The capstone will answer one question: can Hartwell staff the second restaurant contract with qualified maintenance technicians on the schedule the customer wants, and if not, what HR strategy would make the contract viable?

Why This Question Is HR's

The question is not whether Hartwell should want the contract; the owners do. It is whether the workforce can deliver it. Lepak and Snell (1999) argued that employment strategy should depend on how valuable and how specific a group's skills are. Maintenance technicians on a high-speed bun line hold skills that are valuable, since an hour of downtime stops the line, and partly specific to Hartwell's equipment. That combination suggests developing the skills internally rather than buying them, which is exactly the choice the capstone will test. Lerman (2014) reviewed evidence that employers often recover the cost of apprenticeships through the productivity and retention of the people they train, which makes the internal route worth pricing rather than dismissing as slow.

Evidence Available

Table 1

Evidence the Capstone Will Use

Composite organization. Records shared in summary form with the HR director's agreement.

Scope and Limits

The capstone covers maintenance technicians only, because they are the binding constraint; production workers can be hired and trained in weeks. It does not evaluate the contract's financial terms. Cappelli (2008) argued that talent planning should match the uncertainty of demand, so the capstone will treat the customer's schedule as a scenario, not a certainty.

Planned Sections

Profile, gap analysis, workforce plan, rewards, reconciliation, executive summary, appendices and the final paper, in that order, each building on the last.

References

Cappelli, P. (2008). Talent on demand: Managing talent in an age of uncertainty. Harvard Business Press.

Lepak, D. P., & Snell, S. A. (1999). The human resource architecture: Toward a theory of human capital allocation and development. Academy of Management Review, 24(1), 31-48. https://doi.org/10.2307/259035

Lerman, R. I. (2014). Do firms benefit from apprenticeship investments? IZA World of Labor, Article 55. https://doi.org/10.15185/izawol.55