Recommendations: What improvements could you offer as an IT leader managing the strategy for the situation covered by the case? Consider time, cost, human capital, and the current status IT within the organization.

Maintenance and tracking: How would you specifically maintain the plan through the duration covered by the time span and how would you specifically track progress made by the efforts within the strategic plan?

Evaluation

Analyzing the current and future of Starbucks strategy is determined by how it approaches the market and competitors of today. In its strategy, international and national mangers are heading up with the CEO, Howard Schultz.

Their marketing must increase to compete against international countries such as China, India, and Brazil along with local and immediate competitors such as McDonalds and Duncan Donuts. These all offer about the same service and product that Starbucks has and should not be underestimated (Jurevicius, 2016). However, with the plans that are laid out to carry the strategies to another level should put Starbucks back to where they need to be.

Some of the weaknesses that they need to overcome are the rising of coffee beans, trademark infringements, competition of local and international companies, saturated markets, price sensitivity, and negativity from the public. However, by using the strategy developed, some other opportunities have risen. Some of those are to go after the markets in the international countries, increase in the single serve pods, flavored coffee in the United States, and the ability to offer courtesy coffee.

There is a different means of analyzing the strategy that management developed which is Porter's Five Forces (Mind Tool, 2017). The tool is simple but has a powerful use in nature. The five areas are supplier power, buyer power, Competitive Rivalry, threat of substitution, and threat of new entry.

Supplier power addresses how the supplier can drive up the cost of goods and material to produce the product. Buyer Power addresses the power of how the buyer can make the prices of goods go down. Competitive rivalry develops how well the competitors can match what the company has to offer and what can Starbucks do to take advantage of this.

The threat of substitution is well can the buyers substitute the product being sold by Starbucks which again stresses the ability of them to stop or slowing down the substitution. Threat of new entry means how easy can others enter the market of Starbucks and become a major distributor. In a diagram of the analysis is competitive rivalry is in the center with the others pointing towards it.