MAA703 Accounting for Management Trimester 2 2019
Assessment Task 2 – Part (A) written report – Team Assignment
Team of 3-4
DUE DATE AND TIME Wednesday of Week 8 – 4/09/2019 by 11:59PM
PERCENTAGE OF FINAL GRADE 20%
WORD COUNT 2500 words
Learning Outcome Details
| Unit Learning Outcome (ULO) | Graduate Learning Outcome (GLO) |
| ULO 1: Develop and apply management accounting techniques for costing, control, planning, budgeting and performance measurement and management. | GLO 1: Discipline-specific knowledge and capabilities |
| ULO 2: Identify, locate and synthesise management accounting information from diverse sources. | GLO 3: Digital literacy |
Description
While budgets are criticized for being time consuming and providing poor value to users, they are widely used in most organizations (Sponem and Lambert, 2016). There is also significant research findings that suggest participative budgeting improve organizational performance.
In this assessment you will work collaboratively as a member of a team to write a 2500 words report and critically evaluate how participative budgeting could improve organizational performance under the agency theory.
You will work as a team with two or three others to complete this task. You are expected to meet regularly, to keep evidence of your meetings, the decisions you make during those meetings, a record of contributions to the task by each team member, and notes on how you managed the teamwork process. You will use this evidence for Part B of this task which is a written reflection on your capacity to work as a productive and positive member of the team. Teamwork is one of the vital components of many workplaces and the ability to demonstrate teamwork in the learning environment is an important component of your university education.
One important skill being assessed in this task is your capacity to work as a member of a team and to be able to identify the elements that make for a successful team. To this end, it will be important for you to consider how you might work as a team to undertake these tasks. What roles might each team member need to take on, in order to complete these steps? What discussions might you need to have, for instance, in framing the behavioural consequences of the participative budgeting that limits the effectiveness of budgets? See the assessment brief for Part B of this task for more information relating to the teamwork aspect.
What is required to complete this assessment?
- Form a team of three or four and register the team. Details for how to register your team are on the unit’s CloudDeakin site. The sooner you organise your team, the sooner you can get started.
- Have the initial team meeting and upload team contact.
- Meet regularly to plan and progress towards achieving the assessment objectives (at least 3 meetings). All meeting minutes to be uploaded.
- It is vital that as you work with your team members you compile evidence of your contributions to and interactions with the team. See the assessment brief for Part B of this task for more details.
- Using the MAA703 Report submission template (available on the CloudDeakin site), compile the final report.
- The written report must be submitted electronically by the due date by ONE member of the team (team leader). That means, only one submission per team.
The journal article – cited below – is a good starting point for the written report.
Blay, Allen, Douthit, Jeremy, and Fulmer, Bachman 2019, Why don’t people lie? Negative affect intensity and preferences for honesty in budgetary reporting, Management Accounting Research, Vol. 42, pp 56-65, https://www-sciencedirect-com.ezproxy-b.deakin.edu.au/science/article/pii/S1044500518300337
You will need to search additional primary-source references i.e. peer-reviewed journals, scholarly books or book chapter, video, or discussion thread, or blog (avoid Wikipedia type material) and find another six published research papers themed “participative budgeting” and “management accounting”.
Your written report should provide evidence that you have carefully examined the literature, understood the articles you have selected, and been able to critically analyse their essential contents by integrating their insights and conclusions into your own arguments and perspective.
Submission
There is a report template in CloudDeakin and you are strongly encouraged to use that for your submission. It includes a title page. Ensure you fill in the required details (name, student ID, word count) on the title page and in the header of the document (page 2).
The document you upload must be a Word document. If you choose not to use the template provided, ensure you include all the requisite details on the title page.
Name your team’s submission using the following syntax: <your_team_number_MAA703.doc (or ‘.docx’), For example, ‘Team_01_MAA703.doc’.
Submitting a hard copy of this assignment is not required.
The written report must be submitted electronically by the due date by ONE member of the team (team leader). That means, only one submission per team. Your report is to be uploaded to the team assignment Dropbox, via the MAA703 site on CloudDeakin.
Each member of the team must keep a backup copy of the final report, until the marked assignment has been returned. In the unlikely event that your assignment is misplaced, you will need to submit your backup copy.
Any work you submit may be checked by electronic or other means for the purposes of detecting collusion and/or plagiarism.
When you submit an assignment through your CloudDeakin unit site, you will receive an email to your Deakin email address confirming that it has been submitted. You should check that you can see your assignment in the Submissions view of the Assignment dropbox folder after upload, and check for, and keep, the email receipt for the submission. If you uploaded the submission, it would be a courtesy to forward this email to other team members.
Marking and Feedback
The marking rubric for this task is available on the CloudDeakin unit site. It is always a useful exercise to familiarize yourself with the criteria before completing any assessment task, and this one is no different. Criteria act as a boundary around the task and therefore help keep you on track when completing this task.
Identifying the standard you aim to achieve is also a useful strategy for success and to that end, familiarizing yourself with the descriptor for that standard is highly recommended.
Students who submit their work by the due date will receive their marks and feedback on CloudDeakin 15 working days after the submission date.
Evidence
It is vital that as you work with your team members you compile evidence of your contributions to and interactions with the team. See the assessment brief for Part B of this task for more details.
Extensions
There will be no extensions of time granted unless there are exceptional and most unusual circumstances outside the students’ control.
Students who require a time extension in relation to this assignment should submit a written request to the Unit Chair, supported with documentation (for example, medical certificate). Such requests should be e-mailed to the Unit Chair. Requests for time extensions will not be considered after 12 noon, Wednesday 28 August 2019.
Referencing
Any material used in this assignment must be acknowledged and appropriately referenced. You can find information about plagiarism and other study support resources at the following website:
http://www.deakin.edu.au/students/study-support
Support
The Division of Student Life (see link below) provides all students with editing assistance. Students who wish to take advantage of this service must be organized and plan ahead and contact the Division of Student Life in order to schedule a booking, well in advance of the due date of this assignment. https://www.deakin.edu.au/about-deakin/faculties-and-divisions/administrative-divisions/division-of-student-life
Notes
- Be sure that you adhere strictly to the word limit as penalties apply for failure to remain within the prescribed word limit. A 10% tolerance will be applied to the word limit.
- The reference list (you must correctly use the Harvard style of referencing) is not included in the total word count. If you include tables and figures these are also not included in the word count.
- Penalties for late submission: The following marking penalties will apply if you submit an assessment task after the due date without an approved extension: 5% will be deducted from available marks for each day up to five days, and work that is submitted more than five days after the due date will not be marked. You will receive 0% for the task. ‘Day’ means working day for paper submissions and calendar day for electronic submissions. The Unit Chair may refuse to accept a late submission where it is unreasonable or impracticable to assess the task after the due date.
- For more information about academic misconduct, special consideration, extensions, and assessment feedback, please refer to the document Your rights and responsibilities as a student in this Unit in the first folder next to the Unit Guide of the Resources area in the CloudDeakin unit site.
- Building evidence of your experiences, skills and knowledge (Portfolio) – Building a portfolio that evidences your skills, knowledge and experience will provide you with a valuable tool to help you prepare for interviews and to showcase to potential employers. There are a number of tools that you can use to build a portfolio. You are provided with cloud space through OneDrive, or through the Portfolio tool in the Cloud Unit Site, but you can use any storage repository system that you like. Remember that a Portfolio is YOUR tool. You should be able to store your assessment work, reflections, achievements and artefacts in YOUR Portfolio. Once you have completed this assessment piece, add it to your personal Portfolio to use and showcase your learning later, when applying for jobs, or further studies. Curate your work by adding meaningful tags to your artefacts that describe what the artefact represents.