Case Scenario:
Step 1: Organizational Strategy and Objectives
While having a clearly defined and well understood mission along with key goals, vision and values is important, success is unlikely without corresponding actions guided by an organizational strategy and associated measurable objectives.
Organizational Strategy
You should provide a brief overview of your organization's strategy. Remember, this report will be used in part to orient new employees to the company, so you don't need to conduct a detailed analysis. You will, however, have a chance to do a more thorough examination of these elements in future projects.
Objectives
• Find and analyze your organization's organizational strategy.
• For publicly traded companies, these should be relatively easy to locate, but this may not be true for the organization where you work.
• If possible, confirm the process used in creating, reviewing, and revising these objectives as well as who contributes and how this happens.
• Additionally, your report should include a preliminary evaluation of success in achieving objectives.
• It should also include the tools and methods you used to reach your conclusions, such as the balanced scorecard and key performance indicators (KPIs)
When analyzing your organization's strategy and objectives and their implications for performance, it is useful to consider the point made by some critics of strategic planning that sometimes very successful ventures result from a series of unintended/unexpected activities. Thus, you will also want to be on the lookout for evidence that some of the successes realized by your organization may not be the result of a rational strategic planning process.
Step 2: Strategy Types and Competitive Advantage
Now that you've reviewed your organization's strategy and objectives, it's time to critically analyze the type (or types) of strategy your organization may be using.
Business Unit and Corporate Strategies
• First, review the two major types of strategies: organizational strategy and corporate strategy -and then figure out which apply to your organization.
Competitive Advantage
• Even if your organization is successfully implementing its strategic and financial objectives, its activities may not be contributing to competitive advantage.
• Try to identify what, if any, your organization's sources of competitive advantage are and present a preliminary assessment of the relative value of these advantages. You will have an opportunity to look at this in greater depth later in your MBA program.
• See if you can identify your organization's core competencies and reach any supportable conclusions about how (and whether) they are utilized to achieve competitive advantage.
Step 3: Organizational Size and Structure
Like strategy types and competitive advantage, organizational size and structure also have implications for accomplishing mission, vision, goals, and objectives (MVGOs).
Organizational size
• Review your organization's size and how much this has changed over the last five years.
• Include an analysis of how your organization's size impacts its ability to accomplish its strategic objectives.
Organizational structure
• This refers to who reports to whom and is most easily discovered by studying an organizational chart. If your organization does not have a chart or if it doesn't reflect reality, read this for help constructing an organizational chart.
• Having a chart for your organization will be helpful in determining which of the numerous structural types best apply.
• Finally, include an analysis of whether the current structure aligns with and impacts the organization's MVGOs and, if not, the likely consequences.
When you have completed Steps 4, 5, and 6, submit your analysis for review and feedback
Step 4: Critical Resources
Now that you've examined the organizational big picture-MVGOs, size, and structure-you're going to analyze the critical resources of your organization.
Critical Resources
• Consider whether your organization has the critical resources needed to accomplish its MVGOs, whether these are being used effectively, and whether they are being leveraged for competitive advantage.
• Read about these two theories to learn more about how and why certain resources may serve as a source of strength for an organization:
Resource-Based Theory and Resource Dependency Theory.
• Additionally, you should consider whether your organization has valuable, rare inimitable, and non-substitutable (VRIN) (characteristics of resources) that it can use to competitive advantage and whether these are sufficient given the market or markets in which your organization is operating.
Types of critical resources
For each of the items below prepare a simple-to-understand "high level" description of the organization's situation that will prove helpful for people new to the organization. Depending upon your personal and professional interests and priorities and the characteristics of your organization, you may opt to limit the scope of your overview and analysis of these resources. Be sure to consult with your faculty when/if you have questions about how to handle this part of the project.
• Human resources
• Financial resources
• Technology resources
• Buildings and equipment (physical resources)
• other types of resources you consider important (for example, information)
Briefly describe all resources, analyze their alignment with and support for MVGOs, and identify issues that may merit further attention.