Celebrating Apprenticeship Success

For the last year, our Group IT Manager Dominic Putka has been working towards the ILM Level 5 award in the Operations/Departmental Manager Apprenticeship. His work was consistently of the highest quality, and on completion of the apprenticeship we're proud to share that he was awarded a Distinction.

The End Point Assessment (EPA)

As part of his apprenticeship, Dominic was tasked with completing an End Point Assessment, requiring him to use skills learned throughout the programme to design and lead a project to improve the business in some way.

Dominic identified that the existing people management process was extremely long-winded and complex, causing time delays for the management team and using manual processes in an otherwise digitally-enabled workforce.

For example, to submit an employee change, such as a salary increase or line manager change, the line manager had to complete a paper form, which was then emailed to the CEO for approval, to be confirmed in the response email.

Dominic’s skills as Group IT Manager and understanding of management and leadership responsibilities, nurtured and developed throughout the apprenticeship programme, inspired him to find a better way to do things.

The Manager’s Toolbox App

To streamline and improve the process, Dominic created the Manager’s Toolbox online application, designed specifically for Rock Compliance and developed within our existing Power Apps tool.

With one of our organisational objectives being to create a tech-enabled business and another to position ourselves for scale, this was perfectly in line with company growth and operational strategy.

Project objectives:

• Identify the business and stakeholder requirements
• Select the best coding language for the application to be built in whilst delivering within budgeted hours
• Develop the application, then carry out user-acceptance testing and full implementation within the business
• Follow Plan, Do, Check, Act (PDCA) methodology to continuously improve the application
• Locate and fix bugs whilst refining the app to improve widespread adoption
• Train people managers and integrate the app into the business
• Improve people management productivity by 40%

The Manager’s Toolbox contains all the forms a manager needs to manage changes within their team, replacing the outdated manual forms that were historically used within the business.

Within the app, managers are able to raise change requests. An automatic approval process refers this to the relevant budget holder, providing further governance around changes, specifically financial ones, and preventing unnecessary spend across the business.

Furthermore, the app contains all other forms a manager may require during an employee’s lifecycle, including recruitment request forms, employee changes and leavers form. This ensures all key documentation a manager needs to manage their people on a basic level is available to them and accessible on both mobile and desktop devices. This was an important development consideration from Dominic due to the remote and mobile nature of much of our workforce.

Successful Implementation

The Manager’s Toolbox was formally launched early May 2024, improving working practices exponentially and ultimately achieving the overall goal of improving management productivity. Its success was due to Dominic’s hard work, commitment, and the skills learned during his apprenticeship.