Project 2
Step 1 Organizing
Your Work
Read the final deliverable instructions below and consider
how you will approach an investigation on your own organization.
Final Deliverable Instructions: A Situation Audit and
Preliminary Analysis of Some Key Factors
You have been tasked by your boss to prepare a situation
audit that presents an overview of your organization (or an approved
alternative). In this report, you’ll focus on analyzing some key internal
factors that, taken together, provide a portrait of your organization. The
information upon which you rely for this report must be publicly available or
available for review by faculty as necessary
Format requirements
Using the provided Situation Audit Template, your audit’s
content is 20 – 25 double-spaced pages, excluding a required cover page, a
brief executive summary, and a list of references used. See this resource for
guidance on writing an executive summary. You may also use appendices for
helpful supplementary information, but these will not be included in the word
limit for this report. Use APA formatting for in-text citations and the
references.
Now that you have a better understanding of the project
requirements, complete the following:
Read over these brief guidelines about conducting research
on your organization. Please discuss with your instructor any limiting factors
you may encounter as you write this report. After you’ve discussed these issues
with your instructor, if you believe it’s best for you to research an
organization other than your own, please read the guidelines about using an
outside organization.
If necessary, schedule any meetings in advance with your
organization’s personnel to obtain the necessary information.
Use the step-by-step Situation Audit Template as your
outline and guide for the entire report — start to finish.
Project 2
Step 2 Key Organizational
Facts
To start, write a brief overview description (creating an
organizational fact sheet) of your organization, including:
when it was established
by whom
its legal form and tax status (legal forms of organization)
its current CEO
its industry or industries
its size
its general purpose
Typically, such overviews in a report this size are no more
than one page in length (approximately 250 – 300 words).
Remember:
Apply the perspective of an outside consultant to your
analysis. Be as objective as possible.
Consider the audience for this report: key stakeholders
(including, potentially, board members), new employees, and anyone else who
would benefit from this overview.
Project 2
Step 3 Mission,
Vision, Values, and Goals
Now that you’ve identified the key facts about your
organization, turn your attention to your organization’s mission, vision,
values, and goals. Taken together, these elements help drive organizational
decisions, can positively impact employee performance, and will influence many
of the other organizational components you’ll be examining for this report.
The mission, vision, values, and goals should be reviewed
periodically to determine whether adjustments are needed in light of changes in
the organization’s performance, capacity, and/or in key environmental factors.
Mission, Vision, and Values
Find your organization’s mission and look at whether and how
it has changed over time. If it has changed, what process changed it?
Analyze the extent to which your organization’s mission (a)
is well understood, (b) continues to inform key decisions, and (c) is well
aligned with what the organization is actually doing.
If your organization does not have a formal mission
statement, read this guide to deducing a mission.
Analyze your organization’s vision and core values. Consider
whether the vision and core values are in alignment with and supportive of the
organization’s mission. Are the vision and core values widely understood and
accepted within the organization?
If you cannot find formal statements about vision and/or
core values, read these to help you deduce vision and core values.
Now determine whether your organization has identified major
strategic goals it is striving to accomplish. Analyze whether these goals are
explained clearly and whether they make sense given the organization’s mission,
vision, and values. In other words, look for alignment of mission, mission,
values, and goals.
When you have completed Step 3, submit the following for
review and feedback:
organizational overview/fact sheet
Project2
Step 4 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.
Project 2
Step 5 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.
Project 2
Step 6 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.
Project 2
Step 7 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.
When Step 7 is complete, submit your findings and analysis
for review and feedback.
Project 2
Step 8 Leadership,
Governance, and Management
Now it’s time to shift your focus to the organization’s
leadership. Management styles, leadership styles, and governance structures can
have an immense impact on the daily experience of employees of all levels.
Leadership can also positively or negatively affect the execution of all the
elements you’ve studied thus far: strategy, resource allocation, competitive
advantage, etc.
You should research and prepare a summary of the following
findings:
an analysis of management and leadership styles
Management control systems
an analysis of organizational leadership
an analysis of governance
When your analyses are complete, prepare your findings for
inclusion in your final report.
Project 2
Step 9 Strengths and
Weaknesses
An analysis evaluating the strengths, weaknesses,
opportunities, and threats, known as a SWOT analysis, is an important task when
analyzing an organization’s situation, especially when the information is
intended for use in strategy development and related decision-making.
For the purposes of this report, however, your interest is
in internal organizational factors and you will therefore focus on strengths
and weaknesses.
Review the elements of a SWOT analysis, concentrating on the
“S” and “W” parts.
Then use the results of your analyses in Steps 2 through 8
to help identify the strengths and weaknesses of your organization.
When Step 9 is complete, prepare your findings for inclusion
in your final report.
Project 2
Step 10 Learning and
Change
The last step before working on all your conclusions and
findings for this report is to examine your organization’s capacity to learn
and change. Learning organizations are organizations that systematically
measure their performance against sound criteria/metrics and then take concrete
actions to change and make improvements.
However, organizations, and people, vary considerably in
their ability to decide upon, implement, and manage change. Therefore, managing
change is extremely important and often goes hand-in-hand with the desire to
improve organizational performance.
First, analyze the extent of your organization’s ability to
learn and change.
Then, analyze any successes and/or failures your
organization has experienced with implementing significant changes in the past
five years.
For further guidance, read this resource on organizational
change.
When Step 10 is complete, prepare your findings for
inclusion in your final report.
Project 2
Step 11 Conclusions
and Recommendations
It’s time to wrap everything up. At each step of the
process, you arrived at various conclusions, and now you’ll take this report to
the next step: making recommendations based on the conclusions and research
that you’ve done.
Once discussed with senior management, these recommendations
and conclusions may form the basis of future strategic plans and objectives for
your organization.
Project 2
Step 12 Final
Deliverable – Situation Audit
The final deliverable should include the work from all steps
above and should reflect the feedback you’ve received from your instructor on
the interim deliverables that you’ve submitted.
Submit your situation audit.
Before you submit your assignment, review the competencies
below, which your instructor will use to evaluate your work. A good practice
would be to use each competency as a self-check to confirm you have
incorporated all of them in your work.
6.3: Evaluate strategic implications for domestic and
international markets of an organization’s industry.
6.4: Develop and recommend strategies for an organization’s
sustainable competitive advantage.
8.1: Evaluate major business/organizational systems and
processes and make recommendations for improvement.
8.3: Identify and distinguish among organizational
structural types and their respective implications for performance.
9.1: Design organizational structure, systems and processes
that support the strategic goals of the organization.
9.2: Evaluate how human capital serves as a source of competitive
advantage.
10.2: Analyze financial statements to evaluate and optimize
organizational performance.
