BUS 475

Week 2 - Strategic Plan, Part I: Conceptualizing a Business

Individual Assignment: Strategic Plan, Part I: Conceptualizing a Business

Write a 1,050- to 1,400-word paper in which you explain the importance of your selected business’s vision, mission, and values in determining your strategic direction. Include the following:



o    Define your business, products or services, and customers by developing a mission statement. Ensure that you are differentiating your product or service.

o    Create a vision for this organization that clearly demonstrates your decision on what you want your business to become in the future.

o    Define your guiding principles or values for your selected business considering the topics of culture, social responsibility, and ethics.

o    Analyze how the vision, mission, and values guide the organization’s strategic direction.

o    Evaluate how the organization addresses customer needs and critique how they achieve competitive advantage.

BUS 475 - Week 3 - Strategic Plan, Part II: SWOTT Analysis

Individual Assignment: Strategic Plan, Part II: SWOTT Analysis

Conduct an internal and external environmental analysis for your proposed business.

Discuss with your Learning Team the forces and trends below that must be taken into consideration while developing a strategic plan. Given today’s business environment and each Learning Team members’ selected business idea, provide a list of the lessons learned from your Learning

Team’s discussion for each of the items listed below. Use this discussion to complete this assignment.

Create a SWOTT table summarizing your findings. Your environmental analysis should take into account, at a minimum, the following factors. For each factor, identify the one primary strength, weakness, opportunity, threat, and trend, and include it in your table.

External forces and trends considerations:

Legal and regulatory

Global

Economic

Technological

Innovation

Social

Environmental

Competitive analysis

Internal forces and trends considerations:

Strategy

Structures

Processes and systems

Resources

Goals

Strategic capabilities

Culture

Technologies

Innovations

Intellectual property

Leadership

Write a 1,400- to 1,750-word synopsis in which you analyze at least seven of the forces and trends from the list above. Your analysis must include the following:



o    Include economic as well as legal and regulatory forces and trends.

o    Critique how well the organization adapts to change.

o    Analyze the supply chain operations of the organization.

o    Identify issues and/or opportunities:



·         Identify the major issues and/or opportunities that the company faces based on your analysis above.

·         Generate a hypothesis surrounding each issue and research questions to use for conducting analysis.

·         Identify the circumstances surrounding each issue; classify the circumstances; attribute the importance of each classification; and test the accuracy of the importance for each classification.

BUS 475 - Week 4 - Communication Plan Outline

 Learning Team Assignment: Communication Plan Outline

Develop a generic communications plan and template. This template will be used to develop a communication plan for your Final Strategic Plan, due in Week Five.

BUS/475 - Week 4 - Strategic Plan, Part III: Balanced Scorecard



Individual Assignment: Strategic Plan, Part III: Balanced Scorecard



·         Resources: Exhibit 7-1 in Ch. 7 of Strategic Management



·         Develop the strategic objectives for your business in the format of a balanced scorecard. The strategic objectives are measures of attaining your vision and mission. As you develop them consider the vision, mission, and values for your business and the outcomes of your SWOTT

analysis. Consider the following four quadrants of the balanced scorecard when developing your strategic objectives:



o    Shareholder Value or Financial Perspective, includes strategic objectives in areas such as:



·         Market share

·         Revenues and costs

·         Profitability

·         Competitive position



o    Customer Value Perspective, includes strategic objectives in areas such as:



·         Customer retention or turnover

·         Customer satisfaction

·         Customer value



o    Process or Internal Operations Perspective, includes strategic objectives in areas such as:



·         Measure of process performance

·         Productivity or productivity improvement

·         Operations metrics



o    Learning and Growth (Employee) Perspective, includes strategic objectives in areas such as:



·                     Employee satisfaction

·                     Employee turnover or retention

·                     Level of organizational capability

·                     Nature of organizational culture or climate

·                     Technological innovation



·         Develop at least three strategic objectives for each of the following four balanced scorecard areas identified above (Financial, Customer, Process, Learning and Growth). Your objectives should be selected, in part, based on an evaluation of a number of potential alternatives to the

issues and/or opportunities identified in the SWOTT Analysis paper and table you completed in Week Three. Base your solutions on a ranking of alternative solutions that includes an identification of potential risks and mitigation plans, and a stakeholder analysis that includes mitigation

and contingency strategies. You should also incorporate the ethical implications of your solutions into your selection.



o    For each strategic objective, develop a metric and target using a balanced scorecard format. (For example, a strategic objective in the shareholder or Financial Perspective is to increase market share. A metric to actually measure this strategic objective of market share increase is, "The

percentage of increase in market share." The target is the specific number to be achieved in a particular time period. The target for the metric of "Increase market share" could be "Increase market share by 2% for each of the next 3 years" of an increase of 2% per year for 3 years.)



·         Write a 700- to 1,050-word summary that explains your critical thinking on how you derived your objectives from your vision, mission, values, and SWOTT analysis.

BUS 475 - Week 5 - Final Strategic Plan and Presentation



Individual Assignment: Final Strategic Plan and Presentation



·         Resources: Vision, mission, values, SWOTT analysis, balanced scorecards, and communication plan



·         Write a 700- to 1,050-word section for your strategic plan in which you add your strategies and tactics to implement and realize your strategic objectives, measures, and targets. Include marketing and information technology strategies and tactics. Develop at least three methods to

monitor and control your proposed strategic plan, being sure to analyze how the measures will advance organizational goals financially and operationally. Finally, recommend actions needed to address ethical, legal, and regulatory issues faced by the organization, and how they can improve

corporate citizenship.



·         Combine your completed strategic plan. This includes the vision, mission, values, SWOTT analysis, balanced scorecard, and communication plan. Your consolidated final strategic plan should be 2,800 to 4,200 words in length.