The aim is for you to:
(a) design a strategy to solve information and/or knowledge problems based in a case study organisation
(b) communicate the strategy in a professional manner in a presentation format (you will not give a presentation, just design it)
(c) explain and justify your suggestions, demonstrating how you your thinking has developed across the module and how you created your suggested strategy, policies and practices in relation to key theories and frameworks discussed in the module.
You will need to:
- Identify and prioritise key Information and Knowledge Management (IKM) issues in Hempton Rowe (the case study company) to help you design and plan a coherent and comprehensive set of IKM strategies, policies and actions to solve these issues. To communicate your plan, you will need to create a PowerPoint presentation that you would give to the senior management team at Hempton Rowe explaining your proposals for improvement and the benefits the company will realise from them (NB: you will not need to give the presentation, just design it). The presentation must include the following slides:1. Title slide
2. Context and key challenges
3. Strategic vision/vision statements and objectives
4. Implementation roadmap/timeline
5. Roles and responsibilities
6. Key benefits of strategy
7. Next steps
You can add up to THREE extra slides of your own choosing, but the overall slide deck should have no more than TEN slides. Any more than this will not be read. (20%)
- Answer the questions below in a report. These questions relate to specific slides and are numbered according to the list of required slides above. You need to explain and justify your ideas, apply theories and frameworks from the module, and make clear links to key reading, lectures materials and in-class activities. Real world examples (where not specifically asked for) are very welcome. (65% in total)
Questions:
- Slide 2: Create a table that includes all the IKM issues you have identified from the case study and use the table to indicate the relative importance and potential impact of each issue in the case study company. Explain with reference to literature and real-world examples why you have prioritised the issues in the order you have (15%).
- Slide 3: using diagrams, visualise links between the overall objectives and vision statements and the benefits you identify later in the slides. Explain and justify your choices of objectives and vision statements in relation to the literature and to the case study (10%)
- Slide 4 and slide 7: explain and justify your timeline. Why do you think the actions will take the time you have indicated? Why are they in this order? (10%)
- Slide 5: Clearly everyone in the company is responsible for ensuring good IKM to some degree. Explain the reasons for the specific roles and responsibilities you have identified – what theories, concepts or ideas from the module have helped you? (10%)
- Slide 6: Explain in detail using relevant theories, frameworks and other literature we have looked at in the module how and why your suggestions will achieve for these benefits for company. How have your ideas about the value (or lack of value) of specific IKM strategies, policies and/or actions developed over the module? (20%).
- Present the slides and report attractively and effectively, including an accurate reference list at the end of your report (15%).
Hempton Rowe Architects
Case Overview
Hempton Rowe Ltd is a UK-based practice specialising in architectural conservation and heritage-led design. With studios in York, Bath, and a growing office in Ghent, Belgium, the firm manages a wide range of projects from parish church repairs to large-scale museum refurbishments and historic site consultations. Hempton Rowe focuses on listed building work, sensitive adaptations of historical buildings, and design consultancy for public heritage grants.
In early May, Lena Koenig, the Design Director based in the York studio, was preparing a supplementary submission for the Bramley History Museum project. The local planning authority had requested a clear explanation for a late-stage design change to the roofline. Lena began searching for the annotated drawings.
She found three versions in the shared folder:
- Bramley_Roofline_FINAL_MARCH,
- Bramley_Roofline_FINAL_REVISED,
- and Bramley_Roofline_USE_THIS_IF_QUERY.
Each contained similar details, but none had consistent dates, sign-off notes, or cross-referenced correspondence. The CAD metadata showed different editors and modified dates. She messaged Alfie D’Souza, the site architect. “Which file did we submit to planning last March?” Alfie replied within minutes: “Not sure. Might be the March one. Or the one I updated after the site visit. Try Sophie—she might’ve cleaned up the folder.”
Sophie Tan, a junior designer initially on the project, had tried to keep track of changes, but she’d been rotated off the project in April. “I saved the revisions we got from Emile,” she said, referring to their partner architect in Belgium. “But I think the ones we sent were on Bethan’s drive. Or maybe George emailed a PDF draft?” Meanwhile, in the Bath office, Heritage Research Lead Bethan Ellis was reviewing feedback from a community engagement session held during the early project phase. She recalled that some attendees had flagged concerns about the proposed entryway design, but the summary documents in the main project folder didn’t include those notes. “I had them typed up,” she said during a check-in call. “Maybe I emailed them directly to David?” A search of her inbox revealed nothing. “It might’ve been in the handwritten feedback booklet we had. I left it in the York office last winter. Possibly under the printer.” No one had seen the booklet.
In the Ghent office, Emile Verbeke, their lead on European collaboration, had been trying to coordinate drawing packages for a concurrent project at De Witte Abbey. He’d noticed discrepancies between Hempton Rowe’s materials and the earlier information package shared six months ago. “Your updated plans differ slightly from the elevations we reviewed last quarter,” he said on a project call. “Are those changes deliberate?” David Ashcroft, Managing Partner, asked for a day to clarify. The updated plans had been completed by a subcontractor in Bath, and the review comments were tracked in a PDF marked Comments_OLD_USEFUL_MAYBE –
uploaded to the shared drive but never flagged. “Have these been signed off?” Emile asked. “I’ll confirm,” David said. Emile did not receive confirmation.
Since Then…
- In the York studio, a new shelf was cleared beside the main group of desks in the open plan office. It was intended for printed documentation of current projects, but over the following weeks, it gradually filled with loose diagrams, site photos, and unlabelled folders. No one was quite sure who was maintaining it. A sticky note reading “For Review – Bramley?” stayed affixed to one binder for nearly a month.
- Lena began tagging her next elevation study with date stamps but soon reverted to shorthand labels when deadlines picked up. Sophie created duplicate folders for project files—WORKING and SHARED—but the naming conventions weren’t followed by the rest of the team, and by the end of the week, five separate “final” plans had appeared in the shared drive.
- Alfie kept a site log for a few days in a sketchbook, then switched to taking notes in his phone, which he didn’t sync. When asked about a detail in the revised stair design, he said, “I took a photo—I think I sent it to Bethan. Or maybe George. I can resend it if I still have it.”
- In Ghent, Petra Maes, the planning liaison, flagged that two different versions of an inventory of materials had been uploaded to the shared drive—one in Dutch, the other in English, each with different information about the materials that were required for a 16th century merchant house project. Neither had a modification date, and it was unclear which had been used to brief the suppliers.
- At the Bath office, Jonas Murphy, a surveyor, tried to reconcile some elevation drawing discrepancies between offices for a church project in Somerset. “I think some of the references got pulled from an old Dropbox folder,” he said. “One of the planners still uses PDFs from that old St. Barnabas job as templates. I saw a footnote for the wrong county on one of them. But I thought we don’t use Dropbox anymore?”
Crisis
In July, Hempton Rowe was notified that its Phase 2 funding application to the Heritage Lottery Fund for Bramley had been paused. The HLF panel was unable to verify a clear line of project evolution from initial proposal to the current delivery stage. Supporting documentation included overlapping versions of key design files, inconsistent report formatting, and evidence of changes without linked rationale. Catherine Martin, the firm’s Finance and Compliance Director, had led the application submission. “We met all the criteria,” she said in an internal review meeting. “But when they asked for proof of design progression, I couldn’t explain the version history. No one could.”
At the next all-office call, tensions were high. Project teams dialled in from York, Bath, and Ghent. George Beale, semi-retired but still involved in advisory work, spoke first. “We used to track this kind of thing,” he said. “We had field journals, site logs, notebooks. It wasn’t always tidy, but it made sense.” “It still does,” said Alfie. “On site, I know what’s going on. We solve things fast. The files don’t always catch up. It’s not my fault.” “They need to,” Catherine responded. “We’re at risk of losing funding because no one can show what changed and why.” In Ghent, Emile added, “We’ve been working around this for some time. There’s no shared structure. Everyone works hard, but differently. On the De Witte Abbey project, there were three different lists of material approvals. One came from York, one from Bath, and one was a screenshot from someone’s phone.”
Without sending the right information to the HLF, the Bramley project was at serious risk.
About The Company
Hempton Rowe Ltd was founded in 1986 by two conservation architects, George Beale and Katherine West (both now retired), who were committed to the protection and revitalisation of the UK’s built heritage. Their early work focused on parish churches, estate cottages, and war memorials in the north of England. Over time, the firm expanded its remit to include urban heritage, museum refurbishment, and crossborder advisory work. By the mid-2000s, Hempton Rowe had built a reputation for combining careful historical research with high-quality architectural detailing. In 2011, the firm opened a small studio in Bath to better serve clients in the South and Southwest, which has since grown considerably. In 2018, a collaborative office in
Ghent, Belgium, was added to support EU-funded cultural and conservation projects. Hempton Rowe continues to focus on listed building work, sensitive adaptations, and design consultancy for public heritage grants. The firm is known for its project diversity—ranging from small rural chapels to multi-year museum redevelopments.
- Total Employees: approximately 80
o Including conservation architects, planners, researchers, project managers, and administrative support staff across three offices.
- Typical Project Scale: £250,000 to £5 million
Hempton Rowe has grown organically since it was founded. It retains a strong culture of personal expertise, informal mentoring, and deep project ownership. Internally, Hempton Rowe is known for its close-knit teams, decentralised autonomy, and a tendency to trust individuals to manage their own work. For much of its history, this approach has served it well, but the firm has recently taken on larger, multiphase projects with multi-office teams and international partners, so day-to-day operations have begun to strain as projects have grown in scale and complexity. The company remains a tightly run SME with an approachable leadership style but with increasing cross-team dependencies.