answered: Task Overview: Core capabilities and business strategy analy

  

Task Overview: Core capabilities and business strategy analysis
Assume the perspective of a strategy consultant retained by this organisation’s senior management team.
Your brief provides a report that evaluates the organisation’s capabilities and competitive strategy. Based on this analysis, provide recommendations for growth.
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Important:
Please choose Activision Blizzard as your target
All 10 sources must be peer-reviewed
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structure
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Report Structure
The following list sets out the sections of your report.
Title page (not included in the word count)
In the title page you should include Title of the report.
Your name and student ID.
Date and unit code.
Executive summary (not included in the word count)
This is a one or one-and-half-page summary of the report, written as a series of short paragraphs or in point form, outlining the:
Purpose of the report
An outline of your chosen organisation’s core capabilities and competitive strategy.
Your recommendations.
The executive summary is different to the introduction. The purpose is in its title: it summarises the entire report so that the busy executive doesn’t have to read the entire document to know your argument.
Table of contents (not included in the word count)
Include all the section headings and subheadings below and the page numbers.
1. Introduction (200 words)
Present your organisation: what do they do? Which industry do they belong in? how big/small are they? Where are they based? How many people do they employ? How long have they been around? [these are suggestions, please don’t feel you have to address them all]
State the problem. Here consider the following questions to help you:
How has their strategy & associated capabilities enabled them to be successful so far?
Consider: Given their macro and industry environment, do they have the capabilities they need to address the opportunities/ threats identified?
If they don’t, then one recommendation (later on) could be centred around the question how do they develop these capabilities? Maybe through acquisitions/ ecosystem creation?
If they do, they may expand to new markets/ or creating new products to take advantage of capabilities you already have but are not using to their full capacity.
2. Analysis (1600 words)
This section comprises the following sub-sections.
2.1 Present your chosen organization’s competitive strategy (cost leadership? Differentiation? focus?). (300 words)
Identify your organisation’s competitive strategy.
To what extent has this strategy enabled them to be successful/ grow?
In what way has this strategy enabled them to be successful/ grow?
2.2 Identify the capabilities and resources of your chosen organisation. Use the tables we drew on in tutorials in weeks 6 and 7 and split them in threshold and strategic. (100 words)
2.3 Conduct a VRIO analysis of one strategic capability identified in the table above (400 words)
2.2.1 From your table in section 2.2. pick ONE strategic capability that enables their strategy (allows their strategy to succeed) and is a source of competitive advantage (e.g. for Qantas it could be safety, for McDonald’s it could be speed of service). Ask yourself – what do they differentiate themselves on? This should be a strength for your organisation.
Remember to break the capability down into component elements (e.g. safety is evident in how aircrafts are maintained, how staff are trained, systems for identifying mistakes, culture that enables people to speak up when they witness unsafe behaviours, leadership that doesn’t cut corners in safety standards when the money is tight). Often the key capability is described in terms of “a culture of…” (a culture of safety, a culture of innovation, a culture of customer service). Or “xyz is in everything we do” (safety, innovation, customer service, excellence).
Companies have more than one capability – a clever student will identify the one for this assignment that they can argue about the most – what information can you find to support your argument.
The idea is to figure out how they differentiate from their competitors (don’t get confused with the word differentiation – if they are cost leaders they differentiate via cost).
Please don’t evaluate the value proposition (the product/service) ? I’m not asking that. Think of what your chosen organisation does to deliver that value proposition to the client: for example our “product” at Macquarie is your degree. That’s not our key strategic capability. Our strategic capability could be curriculum development (how we put together these products/ degrees – this is broken down in staff we hire, how they spend their time, how we allocate resources, whether we run them past industry experts, how we figure out that X degree is needed as opposed to Y etc). So you’re not supposed to evaluate whether the degrees are good but whether what goes on behind the scenes to make the degree is enough to give us a competitive advantage. We could take that key capability and apply it to multiple areas (e.g. not just traditional uni degrees but also exec education, training, consulting even in the L&D space).
For it to be a key capability it needs to fit into the VRIO framework – please explain why your chosen capability is VRIO and therefore a source of competitive advantage.
2.4 Identify one weakness of your organisation (300 words)- this could be a matter of culture, leadership, systems or structure (it can’t be all nor are you expected to address all. It will depend on your organisation, I’m just giving you ideas of what to look for). Use theoretical frameworks and evidence to support your argument.
2.5 Given what you know about your organisation’s strength (the key capability identified before) and weakness, evaluate whether your chosen organisation can effectively address the 1 key sustainability-related opportunity and 1 key sustainability-related threat in the industry you identified in assigment 1.
2.3.1 Present the opportunity. Provide one recommendation that would enable them to address the opportunity you presented in the introduction. (250 words)
2.3.2 Present the threat. Provide one recommendation that would address the threat (250 words)
These could be buying/ allying with organisations, building ecosystems, expanding to other markets etc. It doesn’t have to be too specific (e.g. which organisation to ally with, BUT it has to make sense. If we have to ask why then it’s not a good suggestion/ it’s not argued clearly enough).
Conclusion (200 words)
Summarise the key points in your paper