Solaris IT and Management Solutions develops and markets in-house software systems and provides general management consultancy and training to banking and financial institutions. The company was founded in the UK 25 years ago as family business. Solaris has approximately 500 employees with the company headquarters situated in Reading and subsidiaries throughout Europe as well as the US, Australia, Hong Kong and Beijing.

Solaris is a market leader in its field of operations and places emphasis on delivering excellent service to client organisations and establishing long-term relationships with its customers. The senior management team and key R&D activities reside within the headquarters, where approximately 150 employees work on the development of new products. However a certain amount of autonomy, particularly with regard to HR matters, remains at subsidiary level due to the fact that the labour market characteristics for IT staff are highly context dependent.

The Solaris business model of the relationship with the customer can be divided into four phases:

1. selling product licenses

2. development of the system, fitting specific customer needs;

3. implementation of software at the customer's site, and training customer employees in the use of the system; and

4. eventually providing the needed support, maintenance and additional information when a new upgrade or release is available on the market.

In building these customer relationships, Solaris recognises that the critical limiting factor to business success is the quality of company management. Throughout its 25 year history, Solaris has prided itself on employee engagement and the founder of the company, Mr Andrew King, was a very charismatic person who adopted a paternalistic management style and very informal approach to human resource management in general. In the early days when the company employed less than 30 staff, a large proportion of them family members or friends, the atmosphere or culture was that HRM happened 'naturally'. As a result, LMD was viewed mostly as an individual matter carried out on a more or less 'ad hoc' basis. However, the growth of the company has necessitated a more formal, strategic facing HR function. Today the HR department at Solaris HQ has 8 employees, illustrating the fact the field has moved into greater focus and visibility.

Furthermore, Solaris continues to be a growing organisation and it is beginning to recognise the importance of devising effective strategies on talent management and succession planning. The company wants to target its efforts through training programmes and other development activities in ensuring that it has qualified management candidates who can demonstrate effective leadership in taking on the many new tasks and projects the company is involved with. However, although there has been a slow tendency towards a shift in the attitudes towards leadership and management development, the SMT would like to retain the company culture and informal style of working as much as possible so would like to see a balance of formal development opportunities alongside more 'naturally occurring' emergent learning.

The company hierarchy has three levels of management. At the top there is the executive

management team (EMT) consisting of the managing director, the marketing director and the development director. The second level is the senior management team (SMT) and comprises 17-18 managers, heading the various divisions: sales and sales support, finance, R&D, marketing and HR managers within HQ and operations managers heading up each subsidiary. The third level of management is the total management team (TMT). About 50 managers at this level perform the role of team managers, responsible for leading teams working on specific projects. This is a fairly high number of managers, and naturally they have a lot of additional specialised responsibilities apart from that of management, being technical experts in their field.

Solaris has recently made three new managerial appointments:

1. At TMT level, a IT graduate with an MBA has been appointed as a team manager for a R&D project team working at the company HQ. This will be her first position in the company.

2. Again at TMT level, an employee already working for Solaris at the company HQ has recently been promoted to team manager for a team working on a large contract to develop and implement software systems for a large international insurance firm. The new manager has worked at Solaris for ten years within a number of project teams, both in HQ and overseas so is well versed in the technical requirements of the role and the culture and practices of the company. However, the new manager will find this a challenging role as the team he is overseeing is working to tight deadlines under considerable pressures on a project which has faced some problems in the past.

3. An operations manager at SMT level has made a lateral move from acting as marketing manager at the company HQ to become the new operations manager responsible for their subsidiary based in Barcelona. This manager can speak only basic conversational Spanish although this will not pose a problem in that the language spoken within the subsidiary is English. The operations manager will be on assignment in the subsidiary for twelve months to two years and he will be accompanied on the assignment by his wife and two school age children.

Question 1: What is the nature of this activity

(an induction ,a specific training course , ,an action learning

Project). If a training course (online or face-to-face, accredited

or non-accredited, in-house or external).??