Individual Assignments
REQUIRED
Individual Assignment: Strategic Position Statement Analysis
For this Individual Assignment you will ‘deconstruct' what you think is the current strategic position of your organisation (based on research of the company you selected for your Final Project), and you will do a rough-cut evaluation of that strategy and related strategic position statement.
In Unit 6 you will use the responses to these strategy evaluation questions again to guide you in developing a detailed set of strategy recommendations that address the future.
To prepare for this Individual Assignment:
- Review the Readings and, in particular, examine the articles by Collis and Rukstad (2008), Mitchell et al. (2011) and Reeves et al. (2012).
- Search the UoRL Library and the business press for scholarly sources and articles on the company you selected for your Final Project. Review resources that are related to its strategic position statements, any inferential information on its recent strategies and current strategic plan.
To complete your Individual Assignment:
- Conduct a thorough and well-argued strategy and strategic position evaluation which evaluates your selected company's recent and current strategy, either based on explicit information directly addressing strategy or based on inferential and circumstantial analysis of general information. Use the following questions to guide your analysis and summary:
o Is your organisation's strategy and the specific action plans it has put in motion, consistent, and do all the elements align to support each other? How and why?
o Are the activities, skills, competencies and capabilities of your company tailored to support its strategy? How and why?
o Is the organisation's strategy, and the specific action plan steps it has taken, consonant with the current and future needs of the external ecosystem and stakeholder needs? How and why?
o Is the organisation's strategy, and the specific action plan steps it thas taken, feasible, given current and future investments? If not, what would make it feasible, and how can the company reach the stretch goal (intent)?
o Does your company's strategy lead to incremental change within the industry, or more fundamental change within the industry, or does it establish new positions outside the industry or in blue ocean spaces? How and why is the scope of your company's strategy the most appropriate?
o Does your company's strategy preserve any advantages of the company? Which advantages, and how and why?
o Does your company's strategy position the company to perform activities differently than rivals do? How and why?
o Has the company identified trade-offs and limitations of its strategic action plan? What are they and why?
- Be sure to support your postings with evidence from the Readings and current literature from the UoRL Library and other sources. Consult the Harvard Referencing Style Guide for proper citation and referencing information.
Submit your Individual Assignment to your Faculty Member for feedback. Be sure to submit by the end of this unit in order to receive timely feedback. Contact your Faculty Member for permission to submit an assignment early, to submit an assignment after the end of the unit, or to re-submit an assignment on which you have already received feedback.
To submit your Individual Assignment, do the following:
- Please complete the Individual Assignment and submit it in a single Word document. If you are using tables or worksheets to support your work, you should integrate or embed them as appendices or supplemental information within the Word document.
Individual Assignments - REQUIRED
Individual Assignment: Analysing and Evaluating the Implications of the General Ecosystem and Competitive Environment
In this Individual Assignment, you will extend the general ecosystem and stakeholder analysis that you conducted in your Shared Activity in this unit by also conducting a thorough and critical competitive environment (five forces) analysis of the organisation you have chosen for your Final Project.
To prepare for this Individual Assignment:
- Examine and critically review the peer and faculty feedback that was offered during the Shared Activity.
- Review the Readings and, in particular, examine the works by Porter (2008) and Pitt and Koufopoulos (2012: Chapter 3).
- Review the Tools for Your Strategic Thoughts document and consider how to best deploy them. You are not required to use the pre-designed templates, but you will be responsible for a robust and complete analysis with implications clearly stated.
- Consider the implications of the articles by Nandakumar, et al. (2010) and Andrews and Morgen (2013) as you develop the final draft of your Individual Assignment.
To complete your Individual Assignment:
- Examine and critically incorporate peer and Faculty Member feedback offered during the Shared Activity to modify and improve your general ecosystem and stakeholder analysis work.
o Note: This draft is not meant to be a wholesale but rather an inclusion of any important changes based on peer feedback recently given.
- Conduct a thorough and well-argued competitive forces analysis (focusing on the Porter (2008) framework and work by Pitt and Koufopoulos (2012: Chapter 3).
- Be sure to support your postings with evidence from the Readings and current literature from the UoRL Library and other sources. Consult the Harvard Referencing Style Guide for proper citation and referencing information.
Submit your Individual Assignment to your Faculty Member for feedback. Be sure to submit by the end of this unit in order to receive timely feedback. Contact your Faculty Member for permission to submit an assignment early, to submit an assignment after the end of the unit, or to re-submit an assignment on which you have already received feedback.
To submit your Individual Assignment, do the following:
- Please complete the Individual Assignment and submit it in a single Word document. If you are using tables or worksheets to support your work, you should integrate or embed those as appendices or supplemental information within the Word document.
Individual Assignments - REQUIRED
Individual Assignment: Analysing and Evaluating Implications of the Internal Environment
In this Individual Assignment, you will essentially repeat the analysis that you performed in the Shared Activity, which was a practice session. Based on the various examples of your peers' analyses, you should be in a better position to do a strong resource-based analysis of the organisation that you selected for your Final Project.
To prepare for this Individual Assignment:
- Examine and critically review the peer and faculty feedback that was offered during the Shared Activity.
- Review the Readings and, in particular, examine the VRIOS framework and internal value chain information in Pitt and Koufopoulos (2012: Chapter 5).
- Review the SCOT Analysis document and consider how to best deploy it. You are not required to use the pre-designed templates, but you will be responsible for a robust and complete analysis with implications clearly stated.
To complete your Individual Assignment:
- Prepare a table in Word that replicates Figure 5.3 on page 138 in Pitt and Koufopoulos (2012: Chapter 5). Rather than just using the phrase ‘distinctive capability' as the left hand column, use the following category boxes, in this order from top to bottom:
o Skills: 1, 2, 3, and so on (i.e. core individuals in the organisation who bring distinct value to it)
o Competencies and capabilities: 1, 2, 3, and so on (i.e. work-groups, functional units, discrete activities), as ordered by a detailed rendering of the organisation's value-chain activities
o Other strategic assets
- Using the table to organise your thoughts, make a detailed VRIOS evaluation of the skills, competencies and capabilities and other strategic assets of the organisation that you selected for your Final Project. Use the A through D scale shown in the figure.
- Be sure to explain what the strategic implications of your analysis are and how the set of implications limits or shapes your strategic recommendations.
- Be sure to identify specific future strategy actions and recommendations based on your evaluation of options and to provide a basic defense of why your recommended actions are the most appropriate.
o Note: You may use any and all of the Readings from this unit to support your reasoning.
- Be sure to support your postings with evidence from the Readings and current literature from the UoRL Library and other sources. Consult the Harvard Referencing Style Guide for proper citation and referencing information.
Submit your Individual Assignment to your Faculty Member for feedback. Be sure to submit by the end of this unit in order to receive timely feedback. Contact your Faculty Member for permission to submit an assignment early, to submit an assignment after the end of the unit, or to re-submit an assignment on which you have already received feedback.
To submit your Individual Assignment, do the following:
- Please complete the Individual Assignment and submit it in a single Word document. If you are using tables or worksheets to support your work, you should integrate or embed those as appendices or supplemental information within the Word document.
3000 words apart frm REFerence