Capstone assessment – Written report submission
Format: 3000 words (Only +10%) written report
In preparation for this assessment, you are required to read the following article:
Dobbs, ME 2014, ‘Guidelines for applying Porters Five Forces Framework: A set of Industry Analysis Templates’, Competitiveness Review, vol. 24, no. 1, pp. 32–45.
Your task is to undertake a strategic planning exercise for your own organisation, or for an organisation with which you are familiar. For this assignment, you are required to conduct a detailed assessment of various components of the strategic management process and suggest which business strategy you believe will be the most appropriate for your chosen organisation and explain why.
Procedure
1. Clearly describe the chosen organisation and industry.
2. Identify the company’s key resources and/or capabilities (at least four) and assess the competitive power of each of those resources and/or capabilities using VRIN Test.
3. Analyse its competitive environment using Porter’s Five Forces Framework, assess the nature /strength of the competitive pressures and suggest whether collective strength of the five forces (in your chosen industry) is conducive to good value for the organisation.
The scholarship article by Dobbs (2014), ‘Guidelines for applying Porter’s Five Forces Framework’, provides a comprehensive, structured and practical set of templates that can be used by managers to analyse the competitive environment in their industry.
You must use the templates provided in the scholarship article to strengthen your analysis in this part. Here is the Dobbs (2014) editable framework from Appendix 01 of the article.
4. Based on your analysis, recommend which of the five generic strategies will be most appropriate for your chosen organisation and provide justification for your recommended choice.
5. Critically evaluate the following two components of strategy execution in the specific context of your chosen organisation and discuss their appropriateness for the recommended strategy:
o Organisation culture
o Leadership
6. Provide an overall conclusion and recommendations.
Requirements
• The word count for this assessment is 3000 words (+10%).
• In terms of structure, presentation, and style you are normally required to use:
o AIB standard report format (Report template)
o AIB preferred Microsoft Word settings
o author-date style referencing (which includes in-text citations plus a reference list).
o These requirements are detailed in the AIB Style Guide.
• Reference lists for AIB assignments normally contain the following number of relevant references from different sources: 6–12
• All references must be from credible sources such as books, industry-related journals, magazines, company documents, and recent academic articles.
