PURPOSE

The purpose of this assignment is to gain in-depth understanding of the elements of strategic management theory with a focus on a functional strategy and how it will help them in their future career. They also learn to undertake academic research, use of electronic databases and create an individual professional report.

REQUIREMENT

This is an individual assignment and students should write a report of about 3000 words on a functional strategy based on their major (e.g. Operations, Human Resources, or Marketing). Assume that you are a strategic management consultant and prepare a report for the board of directors of the company that you have chosen.

For this purpose, you are required to choose an established company (preferably a New Zealand company) and undertake the following tasks:

1. Discuss why a functional strategy important and is dependent on corporate and business strategies.
2. Prepare a strategic functional plan that clearly shows your functional goals, objectives and resources
3. Identify control measures/metrics (include timeline) to help you implement and evaluate your functional plan.
4. Identify and discuss two challenges that the board of directors might face in in implementing your recommendation/s and how do plan to overcome them.
5. Discuss how the knowledge that you gained in the strategic planning in this particular field is useful to you in your career.

The report should be in the following format:

• Introduction
• Task one: Importance of functional strategy
• Task two: Functional strategic plan for the chosen area (major related)
• Task three: Control and evaluation measures
• Task four: Likely challenges in implementation
• Task five: Use of knowledge in this functional area in personal career
• Summary and conclusion
• Reference list
  

  

This can be either a company analysed for group assignment or the company they have worked or previously or desire to join for future employment.

. Students will have an opportunity to link their learning in a functional strategy to their career (either current or they are planning to seek employment).

Choice of a company

You can choose any company to undertake the strategic analysis. However, it would be useful to keep in mind the following aspects when you choose a company:

• You should have adequate information (or access to information) about the company.
• The company should have been established at least for 5 years.
• Focus your analysis on a particular country (even if the company operates in different countries) as it would be difficult to undertake environmental scanning of different countries.
• Ensure that you can undertake a meaningful industry analysis by focusing on a single industry (multiple products of a company may belong to different industries).
  

GUIDELINES FOR ASSIGNMENT

Individual effort

Unlike your previous assignment, this is an individual assignment. So you get an opportunity to work on your own and display your learning of strategy process. In this assignment, you will be able to personalize your learning by relating it to a functional area of a business, which you have worked previously or working at present or aspire to work in future.

  

Assessment and break-up of marks

The assignment is marked out of 100. You would note that, in addition to the content, your assignment will also be assessed for on aspects such as research, creativity, originality, writing quality and references (see page 4 for grading sheet).

Scholarly articles and resources

In addition to prescribed textbook, students should read at least fivescholarly peer-refereed articles related to the topic selected from international journals such as Harvard Business Review, Strategic Management Journal, Strategic Management Review, etc. These journals can be found in electronic databases maintained by Unitec’s Library.

In addition to these peer-reviewed articles, you can also use other sources such as newspaper articles, magazines and other internet sources. All the articles and other sources cited in the report must be shown in your reference list. Students will be rewarded appropriately for their research efforts, originality and depth of discussion.

General Instructions

• The assignment should be approximately 3000 words in length excluding references and other support material. Write the number of words at the end of the report.
• Do not simply repeat large pieces of information or sentences from the case study or articles and/or other sources; rather make use of the information to illustrate your arguments and recommendations.
• The main sections of the report must be indexed and pages numbered.
• All citations must be clearly referenced. Use APA referencing style throughout your assignment
• Include a reference list in the same format. This should include the five peer-refereed scholarly articles and other resources such as textbooks, magazines, internet resources.
• Use 12 size font letters and give one and half spacing between the lines.
• Assignment should have your own coversheet.
• Plagiarism will not be tolerated. Students will not only be awarded zero (0) markfor the assignment but may be subjected to disciplinary proceedings.

Please CHAT WITH LIVE Assignment Advisor to know more about Referencing styles and Citations.

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