Conduct research report on a company

Assignment Question:

As a strategy consultant, you are required to conduct research on a company of your choice that has experienced performance failure in recent years as measured by quantitative and qualitative data, relative to other firms in the industry. Drawing on relevant models, concepts and theories covered in this module and those gathered from your extensive research attempt the tasks below:

Task 1

Conduct an environmental and competitive analysis of the firm and discuss the potential consequences of its current performance. Make sure that you present a working definition and framework of strategic success as well as solid data based on researched materials to support your case ( Limit: 1000 words / 25%)

Task 2

Drawing on relevant models, conduct an internal analysis. (Limit: 1000 words / 25%)

Task 3

Using the blue ocean model, discuss the possible strategic trajectories or paths that your chosen company could follow in order to break away from its current industry and open up new market opportunities in spite of its current success. Justify your argument. (Limit: 2000 word/50%)

Marking Scheme

• The assignment assessment criteria and mark allocation are as follows :

Task 1

Task 2

Task 3

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.

• 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. 63940.

An example of a journal reference:

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