Analysis methods and effective application

Covering Assessment Criterion 1.2 of 5CO02, this video focuses on the range of analysis methods used in people practice and how practitioners select and combine them to diagnose organisational issues, challenges, and opportunities. The methods examined include interviews — both structured and unstructured — observations of workplace behaviour, questionnaires, employee surveys, job analysis questionnaires, work sampling, and the examination of organisational metrics such as turnover rates, absence patterns, recruitment conversion rates, and training completion figures. The video also addresses how internal metrics can be set against sector benchmarks to identify relative performance and signal areas requiring investigation.

Alongside these data-gathering methods, the video revisits a number of analytical frameworks and discusses how the nature of a diagnostic question should determine which tool or combination of tools is applied. Frameworks mentioned in this context include PESTLE, SWOT, the Ansoff Matrix, fishbone analysis, force field analysis, and the balanced scorecard. Rather than treating these as interchangeable, the video draws distinctions between tools suited to strategic questions about future direction and those better aligned to diagnosing specific current problems or monitoring ongoing performance.

The video also covers systematic job analysis as a multi-method technique that draws on interviews with jobholders and line managers, observation, questionnaires, and review of work outputs, and discusses its relevance to person specifications, job evaluation, and development planning. A recurring thread throughout is the practice of triangulating evidence from more than one source — combining qualitative insights from interviews or observations with quantitative patterns from surveys or organisational data — to produce analysis that is both more robust and more credible when presented to decision-makers.