Taking on and reviewing large cases or problems with multinationals is a good idea, and almost every class does offer some of that perspective, but it is never realistic or close to one’s own future plans. Therefore, you are being offered a unique proposition that may provide you the most benefit in your growth, different from the usual case studies, because for this assignment, either you are the company yourself, or you are in charge of the business that needs improvement.
At this juncture, all students have either worked or are currently working at jobs where they might have felt that the available product or services can be done better, if only they were in charge. This sense of ‘knowing better’ is inherent in all of us but we never explore these ideas further and let them die within our own mind games or we always say ‘I have no time to think for myself”.
Additionally, we never step back and take stock of ourselves also. Where are you going with your career? What options are you looking for? Where are your pain points? How do you go about resolving the challenges and where would you like to be, let us say 3 years from now.
Well, this assignment is the chance for you to take some steps to show your expertise or knowledge of where the weaknesses are in the current business, past business, or within yourselves, and where you can make a difference. You can think of process improvement or product improvement, your own career path and how to improve it, or maybe your business idea which you have been exploring for some time. It is possible that you may be working for a family business, and may have ideas to improve on that too.
The choice is yours to pick. However, once you pick the choice, stay with it and develop it thoroughly. Provide real scenarios without sharing anything personal or somethings that might be restricted by your company. Make it real for yourself and develop your ideas with several steps as below:
Create a full project report on the current state of operations by using the first 6 chapters of the textbook as your guideline. Then take on the rest of the chapters to show how these strategies can be implemented and where and when these will create the most impact. Project forward three years and show how the improvements will be seen and who will benefit the most from them. Consider several issues as you work on this project such as:
- The size of the business, location, marketplace, current strengths of the business (if you are looking into the business), or you may be taking stock of yourself and can create your own personal vision for your future.
- Where would you look for weaknesses and what would be the improvements that can be made
- What and how much will it take to improve operations, whether it may be time, money or effort
- Create multiple scenarios of what and how the future might look like
- What would be the top two strategies from your list of ideas or strategies that you feel are possible and you will work on them
- Then create an implementation strategy on how would you go about executing the strategies
- Finally create an evaluation metric as to what steps will you take to see how much you will have achieved what you aspired to do.
- Review the principles of strategy from the textbook and also your own research and create a comprehensive and complete report on the topic of your choice.
Sample Solution
