Assessment

Type of assessment:

This assignment requires students to obtain strategic plans from publicly listed companies and to present a critical analysis of the major elements of these plans.

Aims:

To analyse the content and structure of strategic plans and their relation to the competitive environment.

Assessment task:

1. Obtain strategic planning documentation for three publicly listed companies from their websites or other sources, and identify the major elements of those plans by comparing and contrasting them with each other. What do the plans have in common? How do they differ? Are there any major omissions from all three sets of strategic plans? What criteria are relevant for determining whether a strategic plan has a significant omission? What conclusions can be drawn about the essential constituent elements of strategic planning documents?
(The value of this part of the assignment relative to the total is: 10/30.)

2. Critically examine the Corporate Social Responsibility aims of the companies as stated in the strategy documents, and discuss how effectively the strategic plans communicate those CSR objectives. Briefly comment on how well the CSR part of strategy integrates with the rest of each company's strategies, and on whether the CSR statements are or are not likely to be implemented in practice.
(The value of this part of the assignment relative to the total is: 10/30.)

3. Make an overall judgment about whether the plans are successful in stating feasible strategies for their respective companies. Which components of each plan are effective? Which are not? Why? Is there an overall best plan? Explain clearly the criteria that are used to make these judgments and from where they are derived.
(The value of this part of the assignment relative to the total is: 10/30.)

Total assignment word count:2200 +/- 10%

‘Publicly listed company'-definition:
By a ‘publicly listed company' is meant a company that is listed and whose shares are traded on a stock exchange or share market. The market does not have to be the ASX (i.e., you may look at companies that are listed overseas and may not even operate in Australia). You may email me to ask permission to look at an entity that is not a publicly listed company if you think you would like to analyse it (such as an autonomous government agency or corporation, or a large family-owned company, or a collective whose shares are listed but not traded, and so on).

Where to find strategic plans:
Every publicly listed company must issue an Annual Report. In that Report, you'll generally find statements about what the company thinks its current and future operating environments are like, and how it plans to manage the company in the light of that assessment. In other words, the company outlines its strategy in its Annual Report. Generally, you won't find a section labelled "Strategy", but the information typically appears after the Chairman's or Directors' Report. Companies make other statements periodically, and these can be utilized too. Often, these are uploaded onto the companies' websites under the heading "information for investors" or "investor guidance", etc. Documents from these sources can also be used for the purposes of the assignment.

Test the plans against the strategic management literature and reality:
In each of the given tasks you should test the claims of the companies' strategies against both what the literature of strategic management says ought to characterize such plans, and against reality. While you are not asked to determine if the plans are the best of all possible plans for each of the chosen companies (this is a task you undertake for a single company in Assignment 3), you are asked to check to see if the plans are: truthful, internally coherent, meet the literature's expectations, and are realizable. So, for example, if you pick a company which says its CSR is excellent, be sceptical, as its actual conduct might indicate otherwise. More generally, you should be aware that there's often a certain amount of ‘flannel' and ‘theatre' in a company's annual report and other documents-facts are often presented in ways that flatter the company and its management. This is why there are occasional omissions, occlusions, emphases, and proclamations which don't necessarily correspond to the weight of evidence. It's always best to keep this in mind and to treat the strategic claims sceptically.

Question 1-further guidance:

In question 1, you are asked: "Are there any major omissions from all three sets of planning documents? What criteria are relevant for determining whether a strategic plan has a significant omission?" This question is asking if you think that the three companies have left something important out of their plans and why you think they've done so. The relevant touchstone here is the academic literature, including Grant's textbook. It may be, for example, that ‘mission' and ‘vision' statements aren't much used by all three because of the nature of the business they're in (commodities trading companies, for example), or financing and leverage might be absent because of the relatively secure equity of the firms, or engagement with the political and regulatory authorities might not be significant in some industries (SME manufacturing, for example), and so on. The key thing here is to note any absences that are a bit surprising; for example, banks not talking about customer engagement, or miners not talking about their environmental policies, etc. Mostly, of course, omissions will present themselves by way of your comparative analysis of the three companies themselves-one of your companies will not mention something that the other three do. it's unlikely that all three companies will omit to mention a significant strategic issue. If that were to be the case, however, you need to explain why it's a significant omission, and that explanation will necessarily make reference to the literature.

Financial information is relevant:

As your task involves looking at publicly listed companies, make sure you mention the way the strategies are affected by the financials of those firms, and how those strategies impact on the financials of those firms.For example, one company of the three might have a large debt overhang which mandates that its short-to-medium run strategy is to reduce the size of that debt, but this might not be a factor for the other firms. Or one company might be aiming at top-line (revenue) growth in order to establish itself in the market, whereas the incumbents might not be so focused (they might be driven by the need to reduce costs, for example).

Market context matters:

This is to say that, if you look at two or more companies that operate in quite different markets and their strategies are quite different, you should reflect and comment upon whether the difference in strategic emphasis follows from the difference in market location. Or if three companies are in the same industry, but one company seems to really emphasise its financials, maybe that's because it's highly leveraged or has had recent significant poor results, and it needs to address its financial performance urgently. Or one company might emphasise its competition-which might reflect its highly competitive market it's in. And so on. In other words, you need to explainwhythe differences (or similarities) are apparent by reference to the location of the companies, their recent history, the regulatory environment they're subject to, their financial performance, and so on.

Formatting:

Please use 11-12 point font size, with 1½-2 line spacing, and one inch margins. Insert page numbers at the bottom of the page. Provide a word count on the front page.

Please provide a title page statingthe 3 companies being analysed. On the next page, please provide: 1) a table of contents; 2) an executive summary. The summary should state: the companies you're looking at, the principal literature you intend using to provide criteria for assessing the strategic plans, and a terse statement of which company (or companies) have the best overall plan.

Word length:

The length of the paper is 2200 +/-10%. This applies to the body of the text only-the title page, contents page, footnotes, endnotes, references, bibliography, tables, figures, and any appendices do not contribute to the word count. The appropriate approach if you're quoting large blocks of material from the companies' reports is to put those quoted passages in an appendix (where they won't contribute towards the word count) and to refer the reader to them in the main body of your paper. Shorter quotations can be footnoted or endnoted (where, again, they won't contribute towards the word count). Quotations that are short sentences or phrases will appear in the main body of the text, where they will be counted, but, being short, they won't have a significant impact on the word count.