MBA Conference

Individual Project Guidelines

The individual project is an assessment tool for the AACSB accreditation of student performance for the MBA program. The project will form the basis for your contribution to the final group project. The individual project provides you an opportunity to perform a strategic situation analysis (both internal and external) and to identify strategic issues for the company assigned for your individual project. The analysis for this individual project is based on the premise that you are a consultant to the firm and have been asked to develop a strategic plan. You will need to begin with analysis (not merely a description) of the external situation and a complete justification for what you think are the most pressing strategic factors (driving forces and industry key success factors). Next, you will provide an in-depth analysis of the firm’s competitive position. SWOT is the section in which to summarize the major results of your situation analysis. In the final section, you will identify strategic issues facing the organization that are supported by the results of your analysis. Since recommendations are part of the final group project, you will not be presenting them now.

The most important point to remember as you write your individual project is that your role is that of a consultant preparing this project for the top management of the company. Your project writing should be your own analysis and interpretation all the background research you perform and of the various factors and issues you encounter. You will be referring to various resources as you write your project but with a VERY few exceptions, each sentence you write for this project must be crafted by you. You may include some description/quotes but all such quotes must be followed by your interpretation/analysis. In practical terms, this means no copying and pasting from other sources. For example, when writing about demographic analysis, please do not copy and paste information from US Census Bureau or any other source. Another example would be when writing about internal analysis; you must not copy and paste information from company website or any other source. All information you present from any source should be followed by your analysis.

Please remember that as a consultant you are paid for your analysis and insights and not for assembling a report by copying/describing things from various resources. You will develop an in-depth case analysis using the tools, theories, and ideas presented in this class, the core MBA classes, and your electives. As a consultant your analysis based on your expertise that provides real value addition to top management. Merely gathering information and presenting them in your report provides no value.

The individual project will be completed in three phases. The details of deliverables for each phase are given below. Please refer to the class schedule for the due dates for each of the three phases. Your instructor will return Phase One of the project with comments in about one week. You get a chance to revise and resubmit Phase One requirements based on instructor comments when you submit Phase Two. This gives you a chance to improve your grade for Phase One. Similarly, the instructor will return Phase Two of the project with comments in about one week. You will get a chance to revise and resubmit Phase Two when you submit Phase Three of the project. Again, this gives a chance to improve your grade for Phase Two. You only get one chance to submit Phase Three.

Individual Project Phase One (External analysis):

In Phase One, you will be doing the external analysis which contains environmental analysis, analysis of driving forces, industry analysis, five-forces analysis, competitive analysis and analysis of the industry’s key success factors. A detailed list of possible subtopics for each of these topics is given in the sample table of contents below. Please refer to the document named ‘Note on General Environment’ for additional guidelines on general environment analysis and driving forces. In addition, the document named ‘Industry Analysis Note’ provides further guidelines for the industry analysis and key success factors. Both these documents can be found under the folder named ‘Individual Project’ on the course home page. In addition, there are project samples of previous years’ projects. You can read them to get a sense of the type of information that you may need to include in your project.

Please refer to your class schedule for the due date for Phase One. Please email this document as a word document attachment using the Webct assignment drop box. Although you get a chance to revise and resubmit the first two phases of the project, this represents a major commitment on the part of the faculty. Please make sure that you do a thorough job at your initial submission. Any incomplete submission will adversely affect your grade for Phase One. If your instructor assesses your assignment as incomplete, a grade of zero may be assigned and you may not get the chance to resubmit that phase. The deliverables for Phase One consist of the following:

1. A word document of the above topics of approximately twenty 20 pages, double spaced, Times New Roman Font, 1” Margin on all sides. Your report should cover all the topics and subtopics mentioned in the table of contents below. More important than quantity is the quality of your report.
2. A table of contents for Phase One should include the following topics and subtopics: (Note: I have not included page number for the table of contents but every page must be numbered and include the page number for each topic and subtopic in the table of contents).

Table of Contents

1.0.0 External Environmental analysis
	1.1.0 General Environmental Analysis
		1.1.1 Demographic Segment 1.1.2. Economic Segment 1.1.3 Political/Legal Segment 1.1.4 Socio-Cultural Segment 1.1.5 Technological Segment 1.1.6 Global Segment 1.1.7 Summary of General Environment Analysis
	1.2.0. Driving forces
	1.3.0. Industry Analysis
		1.3.1. Description of the industry 1.3.2. Industry dominant economic factors 1.3.3. Market Size 1.3.4. Market Growth Rate 1.3.5. Industry Trends 1.3.6. Summary of industry analysis
	1.4.0. Five Forces competitive analysis
		1.4.1. Threat of new entrants 1.4.2. Power of Buyers 1.4.3. Power of suppliers 1.4.4. Threat of substitutes 1.4.5. Intensity of rivalry 1.4.6. Summary of five forces competitive analysis
	1.5.0 Competitive analysis
		1.5.1 Industry competitors 1.5.2 Rivals anticipated strategic moves 1.5.3 Summary of competitive analysis
	1.6.0 Key Success factors

Individual Project Phase 2 (Internal analysis)

Phase Two of the individual project will be a thorough internal analysis. The specific topics are organizational analysis, analysis of firm’s resources, analysis of objectives and financial analysis. The details of this topic are given in the table of contents below. Please refer to the document titled ‘A note on financial analysis’ for further guidelines on financial analysis. Please refer to the course schedule for the due date for Phase Two. Please email this document as a word document attachment using the Webct assignment drop box. Although you get a chance to revise and resubmit Phase Two of the project, please make sure that you do a thorough job at your initial submission. Any incomplete submission will adversely affect your grade for Phase Two. If your instructor assesses your assignment as incomplete, a grade of zero may be assigned and you may not get the chance to resubmit that phase. The deliverables for Phase Two consists of the following:

1. A word document of the above topics of around 20 pages, double spaced, Times New Roman Font, 1” Margin on all sides. Your report should cover all the topics and subtopics mentioned in the table of contents below. The number of pages is only an approximate guideline but what is really important is the quality of your report.
2. A table of contents for Phase Two should include the following topics and subtopics: (Note: I have not included page number for the table of contents but you need to mention the page number for each topic and subtopic for the table of contents).

2.0.0 Internal analysis
	2.1.0 Organizational Analysis
		2.1.1 Corporate Mission 2.1.2. Products and services 2.1.3 Leadership 2.1.4 Organizational culture 2.1.5 Organizational structure 2.1.6 Summary of Organizational Analysis
	2.2.0 Analysis of firm’s resources
		2.2.1 Tangible resources 2.2.2 Intangible resources 2.2.3 Capabilities 2.2.4 Core competencies and sustainable advantages 2.2.5 Summary of firm’s resources
	2.3.0 Analysis of objectives
		2.3.1 Short-term objectives 2.3.2 Long-term objectives 2.3.3 Financial objectives
	2.4.0 Financial analysis
		2.4.1 Valuation analysis 2.4.2 Growth analysis 2.4.3 Profitability analysis 2.4.4 Financial strength analysis 2.4.5 Dividend analysis 2.4.6 Management efficiency analysis 2.4.7 Stock price analysis 2.4.8 Summary of financial analysis

Individual Project Phase 3 (Internal analysis: Strategic analysis and SWOT analysis)

For Phase Three, you will continue working on the internal analysis and perform SWOTs. Please see table of contents below for the details of these two topics. Please note that the value chain analysis that you do here should be based on the organizational analysis you had done as part of Phase Two deliverables.

	2.5.0 Strategic analysis
		2.5.1 Corporate level strategy and international strategy 2.5.2 Business level strategy 2.5.3 Value chain analysis 2.5.4 Summary of strategic analysis
	2.6.0 SWOT Analysis
		2.6.1 Strengths 2.6.2 Weakness 2.6.3 Opportunities 2.6.4 Strengths 2.6.5 Summary of SWOT analysis

Your project deliverable for this phase should include all of Phase One, Phase Two and the two topics (strategic analysis and SWOT analysis above). That is, for Phase Three, include everything from Phases One and Two you had completed before along with the two topics above. You will be combining everything you have done so far for this project into a single document and submitting it in this phase. Therefore, the table of contents for Phase Three should contain all the preceding topics and subtopics.

 

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