HRM5960 asks a single integrative question: given everything you've learned across talent acquisition, compensation, engagement, legal compliance, and strategic HR, how would you diagnose and solve a real, complex HR challenge facing an actual or realistic organization?
Diagnosing an organizational HR challenge
The capstone begins with a comprehensive organizational diagnosis — identifying a genuine HR problem (e.g., high turnover in a specific role, low engagement in a particular business unit, or an HR function that isn't strategically aligned with the business) using the evidence-based HR methods from HRM5080, drawing on multiple data sources rather than assuming the presenting symptom is the actual root cause.
Designing and defending a comprehensive HR transformation plan
Students then design a comprehensive intervention plan that integrates concepts across the full curriculum — a talent strategy component, a total rewards component, an engagement component, and a change management/implementation plan — while explicitly addressing legal and ethical considerations and building a business case with projected ROI. The capstone requires defending every recommendation against likely stakeholder pushback, not just presenting an idealized solution.
Key topics in HRM5960
- Comprehensive organizational HR diagnosis using multiple evidence sources
- Integrating talent acquisition, total rewards, and engagement strategy into one transformation plan
- Legal and ethical risk assessment embedded in the transformation plan
- Change management and implementation roadmap for the proposed transformation
- Building a business case with projected ROI for HR leadership and executive stakeholders
- Anticipating and addressing stakeholder objections to the proposed HR transformation
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Our business experts build capstone-level HR transformation plans that integrate the full curriculum with genuine rigor.
Worked example: a capstone HR transformation plan outline
- Diagnosis: Exit interview and engagement data reveal high turnover among first-year employees in a specific department, driven by unclear growth paths and inconsistent onboarding
- Talent component: Redesign onboarding with a structured 90-day plan and assigned mentor
- Rewards component: Introduce a clearer promotion and pay-progression framework tied to defined competencies
- Engagement component: Quarterly stay interviews for first-year employees, replacing reliance on annual engagement surveys alone
- Business case: Projected reduction in first-year turnover translated into estimated cost savings versus the transformation's implementation cost
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Frequently asked questions
Each earlier course in the HR curriculum focuses on a specific functional area in depth — HRM5060 on talent acquisition, HRM5055 on rewards, HRM5090 on engagement, HRM5065 on employment law — building deep expertise one domain at a time. HRM5960 requires synthesizing across all of those domains simultaneously to address one integrated, realistic organizational problem, recognizing that real HR challenges rarely stay confined to a single functional silo — a turnover problem, for instance, is almost always connected to some combination of compensation, onboarding, manager quality, and growth opportunity, not one clean single cause. The capstone specifically tests whether a student can hold multiple frameworks in mind at once and weave them into one coherent, mutually reinforcing transformation plan, rather than proposing a set of disconnected recommendations that happen to touch different HR domains.
A technically sound HR transformation plan that ignores realistic organizational resistance — budget constraints, competing executive priorities, manager skepticism about a new process, union or legal considerations — is unlikely to actually be implemented, no matter how well-designed it is on paper. HRM5960 requires students to think through likely pushback (for example, "Finance will ask why this pay-progression framework costs more than current practice" or "Line managers will resist adding another onboarding requirement to their already full schedules") and build responses or plan adjustments into the proposal itself. This mirrors real HR practice, where the strongest proposals are the ones that have already anticipated and addressed the objections a CFO, a skeptical VP, or an overworked frontline manager would raise — building that anticipation into a capstone project is meant to simulate the actual persuasive and political work required to move an HR initiative from proposal to implementation.