Strategic Management

Assignment Question  : 

As a strategy consultant you have been invited by the board of directors of a company of your choice to advise them on the possibility of changing the strategy of their company.  In particular they are keen to redesign their strategy along the lines of the much publicised blue ocean strategy and also consider the possibility of developing a global strategy

Required: Task 1 

Carry out a full analysis of the industry or sector in which the company is currently operating. Drawing on relevant models and using appropriate company data, critically appraise its current strategy.  (1000 words)

Task 2: Critically discuss the ways in which the company could shift its strategy  from “Red Ocean” to “Blue Ocean”. (2000 words)

Task 3: Identify and discuss the key strategic challenges that the company should consider in developing a global strategy. (1000 words)

Marking Scheme 

The assignment assessment criteria and mark allocation are as follows :Task 1 Application of tools ( PESTEL, five forces, strategic mapping, Yip’s drivers, CAGE etc) to analyse competitive data. 15% Application of strategy capabilites model and choice models to assess the current strategy. 10% Task 2 Meaning and classification of blue ocean. 5% Implications of red ocean for the company. 5% Ways in which a blue ocean strategy could be developed using blue ocean tools and techniques. 30% Brief discussion of managing strategy development and implementation. 5% Research Skills (Use of free web-based resources such as company reports, trade association statistics and some government or supra-governmental (EU, UN) reports and statistics, the business press and journals available through BusinessSource Premier, Factiva or Proquest, and reports from organisations such as Euromonitor, Key Notes and Mintel. 5% Task 3 Use of models to identify global strategic decisions. 15% Relationship between blue ocean and globalisation.10%

 

General Guidelines 

	The submission of your work assessment should be organized and clearly structured in a report format.
	Maximum word length allowed is 4000 words, excluding words in charts & tables and in the appendixes section of your assignment.
	This assignment is worth 100% of the final assessment of the module.
	Student is required to submit a type-written document in Microsoft Word format with Times New Roman font type, size 12 and line spacing 1.5.
	Indicate the sources of information and literature review by including all the necessary citations and references adopting the Harvard Referencing System.
	Students who have been found to have committed acts of Plagiarism are automatically considered to have failed the entire semester. If found to have breached the regulation for the second time, you will be asked to leave the course.
	Plagiarism involves taking someone else’s words, thoughts, ideas or essays from online essay banks and trying to pass them off as your own. It is a form of cheating which is taken very seriously.

Notes on Plagiarism & Harvard Referencing  

Plagiarism 

Plagiarism is passing off the work of others as your own. This constitutes academic theft and is a serious matter which is penalized in assignment marking.

Plagiarism is the submission of an item of assessment containing elements of work produced by another person(s) in such a way that it could be assumed to be the student’s own work. Examples of plagiarism are :

	the verbatim copying of another person’s work without acknowledgement
	the close paraphrasing of another person’s work by simply changing a few  words or altering the order of presentation without acknowledgement
	the unacknowledged quotation of phrases from another person’s work and/or the presentation of another person’s idea(s) as one’s own.

Copying or close paraphrasing with occasional acknowledgement of the source may also be deemed to be plagiarism is the absence of quotation marks implies that the phraseology is the student’s own.

Plagiarised work may belong to another student or be from a published source such as a book, report, journal or material available on the internet.

Harvard Referencing 

The structure of a citation under the Harvard referencing system is the author’s surname, year of publication, and page number or range, in parentheses, as illustrated in the Smith example near the top of this article.

	The page number or page range is omitted if the entire work is cited. The author’s surname is omitted if it appears in the text. Thus we may say : “Jones (2001) revolutionized the field of trauma surgery.”
	Two or three authors are cited using “and” or “&” : (Deane, Smith, and Jones, 1991) or (Deane, Smith & Jones, 1991). More than three authors are cited using et al. (Deane et al. 1992).
	An unknown date is cited as no date (Deane n.d.). A reference to a reprint is cited with the original publication date in square brackets (Marx [1867] 1967, p. 90).
	If an author published two books in 2005, the year of the first (in the alphabetic order of the references) is cited and referenced as 2005a, the second as 2005b.
	A citation is placed wherever appropriate in or after the sentence. If it is at the end of a sentence, it is placed before the period, but a citation for an entire block quote immediately follows the period at the end of the block since the citation is not an actual part of the quotation itself.
	Complete  citations are provided in alphabetical order in a section following the text, usually designated as “Works cited” or “References”. The difference between a “works cited” or “references” list and a bibliography is that a bibliography may include works not directly cited in the text.
	All citations are in the same font as the main text.

Examples

 Examples of book references are :

	Smith, J. (2005a). Dutch Citing Practices. The Hague: Holland Research Foundation.
	Smith, J. (2005b). Harvard Referencing. London: Jolly Good Publishing.

 

In giving the city of publication, an internationally well-known city (such as London, The Hague, or New York) is referenced as the city alone. If the city is not internationally well known, the country (or state and country if in the U.S.) are given.

An example of a journal reference:

Smith, John Maynard. “The origin of altruism,” Nature 393, 1998, pp. 639-40.

An example of a journal reference:

Bowcott, Owen. “Street Protest”, The Guardian, October 18, 2005, accessed February 7, 2006.