Strategic Report: Analysing Business Environment, Industry Analysis, Resources, Core Competences, an

External analysis

This assignment is focused on the selected organisation, its industry and business environment. Please choose one case (featuring an organisation) for the purposes of this assignment.

Formative work in weekly seminars will guide students through analytical techniques and processes required to complete the task. The Strategic Report should address the following:

1)Carry out external analysis (business environment and industry) to identify a set of Opportunities and Threats and assess industry attractiveness.

2) Analyse the resources and key competences of the organisation and identify core competences (key factors that may give the company its competitive advantage).

3) Choose one strategy that the company implemented recently and evaluate it using SAFe criteria.

How will we support you with your assessment? There will be weekly references to the assessment task in seminars and weekly activities in those seminars will be helpful in creating “scaffolding” for eventual submission.

In this Strategic Report, high marks come from using strategic concepts and analysis from the module clearly applied to the organisation.

Outline marking expectations are as follows:

Q1: External analysis. Discuss the business environment and identify a number of Opportunities - Os and Threats - Ts (we expect 6 issues from business environment to be discussed in total each of which concluded as an O or a T). Industry analysis (5 Forces) should be applied to assess industry attractiveness (each force should be discussed and assessed as High, Moderate or Low and industry attractiveness should be assessed having those forces in mind).

Q2:  Internal analysis. Identify and discuss organisation’s resources & unique capabilities (at least 6 Strengths and Weaknesses should be covered in total). Demonstrate how unique capabilities link to competitive advantage (use VRIO to identify Core Competences for the organisation).

Q3: (30%) Strategy Evaluation Choose a recent strategy that the company undertook and evaluate it using the three SAFe tests. PRESENTATION: (10%) We expect a professional report with clear report style (not an essay)