BUS 475 Complete Course

Individual Assignments:

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 businesss vision, mission, and values in determining your strategic direction. Include the following:

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

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

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

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

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

Format your paper consistent with APA guidelines.

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 todays business environment and each Learning Team members selected business idea, provide a list of the lessons learned from your Learning Teams 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:

o Legal and regulatory

o Global

o Economic

o Technological

o Innovation

o Social

o Environmental

o Competitive analysis

Internal forces and trends considerations:

o Strategy

o Structures

o Processes and systems

o Resources

o Goals

o Strategic capabilities

o Culture

o Technologies

o Innovations

o Intellectual property

o Leadership

Write a 1,200- to 1,550-word synopsis in which you analyze at least seven of the forces and trends from the list above. Your analysis must include the following:

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

Critique how well the organization adapts to change.

Analyze the supply chain operations of the organization.

Identify issues and/or opportunities:

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

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

o 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.

Format your paper consistent with APA guidelines

Strategic Plan, Part III: Balanced Scorecard

Resource: Exhibit 7-1 in Ch. 7 of Strategic Management

Develop the strategic objectives for your business in the format of 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:

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

o Market share

o Revenues and costs

o Profitability

o Competitive position

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

o Customer retention or turnover

o Customer satisfaction

o Customer value

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

o Measure of process performance

o Productivity or productivity improvement

o Operations metrics

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

o Employee satisfaction

o Employee turnover or retention

o Level of organizational capability

o Nature of organizational culture or climate

o 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 stakeholder analysis that includes mitigation and contingency strategies. You should also incorporate the ethical implications of your solutions into your selection.

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 ton actually measure this strategic objective of market share increase is, "The percentage of increase in market share." The target is the specific number tube 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.

Format paper consistent with APA guidelines.

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.

Prepare three to five Microsoft PowerPoint slides in which you briefly outline the vision, mission, values, and balanced scorecard that you have developed for your business.

Learning Team Assignments:

Value Alignment

Discuss with your Learning Team an existing organization with which you are familiar that is different than the one you used for the Conceptualizing a Business paper.

Write a 700- to 1,050-word paper in which you analyze the individual values and the organizations values as reflected by the organizations plans and actions. Include the following in your paper:

Analyze the origin(s) and subsequent evolution of your personal and workplace values.

Explain how your individual values drive your actions and behaviors, and analyze the alignment between your values and actions and behaviors.

Analyze the degree of alignment between the organization's stated values and the organizations actual plans and actions.

Explain the differences and analyze the degree of alignment between your values and the organizations values as reflected by the organizations plans and actions.

Format your paper consistent with APA guidelines.

Functional Area Interrelationships

Select one organization of the Virtual Organizations from the student website.

Write a 1,200- to 1800-word paper in which you complete the following:

State the primary reasons for the organizations existence from an analysis of the mission, vision, values, and goals.

Analyze the reason for the type of organizational structure employed by the organization, and identify the key positions that support that organizational structure.

Identify and explain the steps of the collaboration process among the functional areas that must be employed to achieve organizational goals, and prepare an action plan to implement the collaboration process.

Identify and provide an example of the use of lateral collaboration and vertical collaboration within the organization, and prepare an action plan to use lateral and vertical collaboration.

Identify the key stakeholders and their roles needed to achieve the organizational goals, and recommend the collaborative interactions among the key stakeholders to facilitate the organizations success.

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.

DQs:

BUS 475 Week 1 DQ 1

What is strategic planning? What is the purpose of strategic planning? Why is it necessary? What are the components of a strategic plan? Which component is the most important? Why?

BUS 475 Week 1 DQ 2

Select a small business that you may want to start. What is strategic management and planning? Why would a strategic plan be important to the success of this business? How are the four functions of management relative to creating and implementing a strategic plan?

BUS 475 Week 2 DQ 1

What is a SWOTT analysis? What is its purpose in strategic planning? Must you conduct a SWOTT analysis to have an effective strategic plan? Why or why not?

BUS 475 Week 2 DQ 2

What are the key planning factors for competitive success? Provide an example of an organization that has achieved competitive success through planning. Provide an example of an organization that has failed to achieve competitive success as the result of failed planning.

BUS 475 Week 3 DQ 1

What are strategic objectives? What is the purpose of strategic objectives? What makes an effective strategic objective? What are examples of strategic objectives for your organization or one with which you are familiar?

BUS 475 Week 3 DQ 2

What is corporate governance? What role does corporate governance play in strategic planning? Why is it important? Explain your answer and provide an example.

BUS 475 Week 4 DQ 1

Why is it important to continuously update the implementation and communication of a strategic plan? Who should be responsible for updating and communicating a strategic plan? Why?

BUS 475 Week 4 DQ 2

Has your current (or former) organization's strategic plan been communicated to you? If so, how and by whom? If not, how would such communication improve your organizational effectiveness? Is it important for employees to know the strategic plan of a company? Why or why not?

BUS 475 Week 5 DQ 1

Why is it necessary to monitor and control strategic plans? Who should be responsible for monitoring and controlling strategic plans? Why? What are the pitfalls of failing to monitor and control strategic plans?

BUS 475 Week 5 DQ 2

As an employee of an organization, what role do you play in the strategic planning process? What role do you play in the implementation process? What role do you play in the monitoring and controlling process?