Company name: Main Ridge Olive Company

In your first assignment, you will conduct a thorough problem analysis to uncover the nature and severity of the problem, the affected parties and their characteristics, and the causes and effects of the problem. This assignment helps you develop a deeper level of empathy around the given problem and enables you to take another individual's and/or organisation's perspective.

This is an essential skill and a professional capability that is built on a thinking process with roots in open-mindedness and removing cognitive biases which subsequently reduces the blind spots in decision making.

Assignment details:

In this individual assignment you are required to conduct a problem analysis by answering the following questions.

Questions to be answered:

1. What is the problem your client wants you to address? What is the severity of this problem? You may want to cite evidence from internal, e.g. client's organisational reports, customer feedback and survey findings, and external, e.g. industry reports, newspapers, journals and government publications, to explain that the problem is real?

2. What causes this problem? Analyse the drivers of the problem you explained above?

3. Who is affected by this problem and what are their characteristics? If you see that there are multiple groups impacted by the problem, you may want to categorise the affected parties, e.g. directly and indirectly affected; small, medium and large organisations; by gender?

4. What impact does this problem have on the client's organisation or business, or stakeholders in the broader society? Identify and discuss the impact on each in relation to the parties you identified earlier?

5. Based on your analysis, what additional information is needed to address this problem? Identify specific information needs and briefly mention the purpose that information needs to serve. This information relates to information resources needed to complete the project, as opposed to specific additional information needed from the client?