help with proj 2 due in 48 hours
combs
Project2MBA610.docxProject 2: Situation Audit Start Here
Print Project
Transcript
Transcript
MBA610 Project2 Start Here Video Transcript
[MUSIC PLAYING]
On Monday morning, as you’re getting ready for work, you see an email from Mike, your manager. When you meet Mike in his office, he greets you with a big smile. “Listen,” he says, “You’ve been doing a spectacular job—I’ve been getting a lot of positive feedback on your performance.” He gestures to a folder on the table in front of you. “In fact, given your recent achievements, I thought you would be the perfect person for this project.” He opens the folder, revealing a report titled Situation Audit, dated 10 years ago. “I did that report, and now it’s your turn to do an updated version.” You leaf through the report, noting the length and the amount of information in it. You look at Mike expectantly. “What we need is a report that summarizes the current situation, focusing on key internal factors that contribute to the organization’s strengths and weaknesses.” He continues, “It’s intended to be a source of information for key organizational stakeholders, but we probably wouldn’t circulate it in its entirety. We would use parts of this report to brief new employees and board members, among others. As you can see, this report would serve a very important function in our organization. Many, many people at all levels would use it.”
Mike tells you the report must include particular elements:
● a description of the organization’s current situation;
● an analysis of the path ahead;
● a review of significant changes that have occurred in the last five years, which should offer the leadership team insights that might be useful for future decision-making; and, finally, any recommendations you have for change or action, given that you might discover some things that merit attention.
“We need this report in four weeks,” Mike advises. “To enable you to focus solely on this report, we’re taking you off your other projects and designating you a special projects consultant—because we need a consultant’s eye for this. You need to put aside your preconceived ideas about the organization and look at it as objectively as possible, like an outside consultant would.” Mike smiles, and shakes your hand. “We know you can do this. You’re the best person for this job.”
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Situation Audit
For this project, you will be creating a situation audit of your own organization, or an alternative organization that you submit for your professor’s approval. You will prepare to conduct your audit over the next 12 steps of this project, during which you will review various aspects of your organization, including its mission, goals, and values. You will be given the opportunity to submit different parts of your audit for instructor feedback prior to submitting your final situation audit. Read the full description of the final deliverable and the steps to completion.
Begin your situation audit by going to Step 1: Organize Your Work.
When you submit your project, your work will be evaluated using the competencies listed below. You can use the list below to self-check your work before submission.
· 1.3: Provide sufficient, correctly cited support that substantiates the writer’s ideas.
· 1.6: Follow conventions of Standard Written English.
· 6.3: Analyze an organization's internal strengths and weaknesses for strategic value.
· 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.
· 9.2: Evaluate how human capital serves as a source of competitive advantage.
Step 1: Organize Your Work
Student Expectations
Students are expected to find the information required to address the specific questions they are required to answer at each step of the project. The primary purpose of Project 2 is for students to demonstrate they understand and can apply the key MBA concepts and course materials found throughout Project 2 to their particular organization. Project 2 is not complete until the key MBA concepts and course materials provided within each step have been applied, as applicable, to the student’s organization.
It is the student’s obligation to demonstrate (1) an understanding of the organization selected for analysis and (2) explain, apply, and integrate the key MBA concepts found in provided course materials to their organization. Examples of how the MBA concepts and course materials apply to an organization are expected. All sources used should be properly (APA) cited in-text and listed in a reference section.
Final Deliverable Instructions: A Situation Audit and Preliminary Analysis of Key Factors
Your boss has tasked you with preparing a situation audit that presents an overview of your organization (or an approved alternative). In this report, you'll focus on analyzing several key internal factors that, taken together, provide a portrait of your organization. The information you will rely on for this report must be publicly available or available for review by faculty, as necessary.
Two important points to consider when preparing the audit. First, you have been cast in the role of an internal and objective consultant. In this professional role, you are tasked to identify organizational challenges, identify what performance can be improved, and recommend solutions to achieve goals. Also, as an employee of the organization you already have knowledge of the organization and can understand the details and challenges of the organization.
Second, you are not just “preparing a report,” but conducting a research-based independent examination of your organization. You are encouraged to express your observations, throughout the audit, as you “raise your voice,” in writing, as an independent and objective consultant.” As an example, you periodically state, “From my perspective as an internal consultant…” Or, based on research, the following observation(s) can be made…”
Format Requirements
Use the Situation Audit Template provided below.
Please center and boldface each audit step. In addition, in order to make sure that you address each topic in the step heading it is helpful to boldface and left justify subtopics. As an example:
Mission, Vision, Values, and Goals (center and boldface)
Mission (left justify and bold face subtopic)
Vision (same as previous)
Values (same as previous)
Goals (same as previous)
Your Situation Audit report will be 18 to 22 double-spaced pages, excluding a required cover page, a brief executive summary, and a list of references. See Executive Summaries for guidance on writing this section. You may also use appendices for helpful supplementary information, but these will not be included in the page limit for this report. Use APA formatting for in-text citations and references.
Academic Integrity
As you proceed through the steps to completion, be sure to read the materials provided in the embedded links—all are related to your project work. Cite any ideas you use from these materials in all course work you submit. By giving credit to the ideas of others in your work, you will build credibility in the minds of your readers and make your original thoughts stand out.
“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
—Sir Isaac Newton
Now that you have a better understanding of the project requirements, follow these guidelines:
· Read over these brief guidelines about conducting research on your organization. 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 this information 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.
Next, proceed to Step 2, where you will write an overview description of your organization.
Step 2: Establish Key Organizational Facts
To start, write a brief overview description creating an organizational fact sheet of your organization, including the following information:
· when it was established and by whom
· legal forms of organization and tax status
· its current CEO
· its industry or industries
· its size
· its general purpose
Typically, such overviews in a report of this size are no more than one page (approximately 250 to 300 words).
Remember to apply the perspective of an outside consultant to your analysis. Be as objective as possible. Also, consider the audience for this report: key stakeholders including, board members, new employees, and anyone else who would benefit from this overview.
When you have finished your overview description, proceed to Step 3, where you will identify the mission, vision, values, and goals of your organization.
Transcript
Course Connection: Situation Audit
Transcript
UMUC Course Connection: Situation Audit
UMUC Logo (fades in)
Title, “Course Connection: Situation Audit” (fades in, fades out)
Speaker: Dr. Michael Frank
My parents never finished grade school. I asked her why she didn’t finish school, becuase my mother, interestingly, was fully literate. And, she told me that when she went to school, if the teachers called on you, you had to stand up when you answered the question. And she said, “I only had one dress.” The story my mother told me then has always stayed with me. It was that impact, and realizing as she said it so many different times and in many different ways that education was a way to social equality, and education was a way to better your own life and the lives of people around you.
I had never done homework in my life, so, I went to college without much preparation and worked hard to get an education.
It’s been said that your first job out of college is not expected to be a bed of roses, and in my case it was literally true. Cause my first assignment was that I was assigned to the landfill to determine all the job classifications and to make an organizational report on the functioning of the landfill. In the course of doing the report, I noticed that the commercial trucks that pulled up to the landfill to dump refuge were weighed at the gate and that the drivers paid the gatekeepers in cash. And whereas I didn’t suspect there was any dishonesty, I could see that there was a real opportunity for it to occur given the way that that particular system operated. So I concluded that finding in my report and as a result of that, there was a subsequent study that was done and in fact it did find that there had been considerable dishonest over a number of years, it ended up in my being promoted in less than five months into my new job, and that really ignited my career. I eventually ended up as human resource director for that jurisdiction.
In a certain way, building a career is the responsibility of the individual, and capitalizing on experiences to learn gives you more and more tools, sort of in your tool kit. Each opportunity in class is just another opportunity to strengthen your skills in a variety of different ways: analytical thinking, writing skills, communication skills, working in teams. These are all the core ingredients of being successful at anything.
To my mother, people who were privileged enough to get an education had responsibility to society as a whole.
Step 3: Identify 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 can help drive organizational decisions, positively impact employee performance, and 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 key environmental factors or changes in the organization's performance or capacity.
Follow the steps below to analyze your organization’s mission, vision, values, and goals:
· 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 (1) is well understood, (2) continues to inform key decisions, and (3) is well aligned with what the organization is actually doing.
· If your organization does not have a formal mission statement, read 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 your organization’s vision or core values, read Deducing Vision and Core Values.
· Next, determine whether your organization practices strategic goal setting. 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, follow the directions in Step 12 to submit your organizational overview and fact sheet and your organization’s mission, vision, values, and goals for review and feedback. Then proceed to Step 4.
Step 4: Analyze Organizational Strategy and Objectives
While it is important to have a clearly defined and well-understood mission, along with key goals, vision, and values, success is unlikely without corresponding actions guided by an organizational strategy that includes measurable objectives.
Your audit should include a brief overview of your organization's strategy using the BalancedScorecard framework. 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.
Follow the guidelines below while working on this part of your report:
· Find and analyze your organization's organizational strategy. For publicly traded companies, this should be relatively easy to locate, which 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.
· Include a preliminary evaluation of success in achieving objectives.
· Cite 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 critics of strategic planning who point out that very successful ventures sometimes result from a series of unintended or unexpected activities. Therefore, 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.
Next, proceed to Step 5, where you will examine strategy types and competitive advantage.
Step 5: Identify Strategy Types and Competitive Advantage
Now that you have reviewed your organization's strategy and objectives, it is time to critically analyze the type or types of strategies your organization may be using, and include that analysis in your audit.
Business Unit and Corporate Strategies
First, review the major types of organizational strategies. 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 your organization's sources of competitive advantage are (if any) and present a preliminary assessment of the relative value of these advantages. You will have an opportunity to examine competitive advantage in greater depth later in your MBA program.
Also, see if you can identify your organization's core competencies and reach any supportable conclusions about whether they are used to achieve competitive advantage, and how.
After your review of strategy types and competitive advantage, continue to Step 6, which examines organizational size and structure.
Step 6: Determine Organizational Size and Structure
Like strategy types and competitive advantage, organizational size and structure also have implications for accomplishing the organization’s mission, vision, goals, and objectives (MVGOs).
Organizational Size
Review your organization's size and determine how much it has changed over the last five years. Include in your audit an analysis of how your organization's size impacts its ability to accomplish its strategic objectives.
Organizational Structure
Organizational structure refers to the pathways that define who reports to whom. It is most easily discovered by studying an organizational chart. If your organization does not have a chart, or if the chart doesn't reflect reality, read Organizational Structure 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.
Include in your report 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, follow the instructions in Step 12 to submit your organizational strategy and analysis to the Assignments folder for review and feedback. Then proceed to Step 7.
Step 7: Analyze Critical Resources
Now that you've examined your organization’s big picture—MVGOs, size, and structure—you're going to analyze the critical resources of your organization for inclusion in your report.
Critical Resources
As you analyze your organization’s critical resources, follow the guidelines below:
· 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 resource-based theory and resource dependency theory to learn more about how and why certain resources may serve as a source of strength for an organization.
· Consider whether your organization has valuable, rare, inimitable, and nonsubstitutable (VRIN) resources (characteristics of resources) that it can use toward a competitive advantage, and whether these are sufficient given the market or markets in which your organization is operating.
Types of Critical Resources
Briefly explain the relevance of resource-based theory and resource dependency theory to an organization's critical resources; then analyze and discuss two or three highlights that pertain to your organization's human, financial, technological, and physical resources. Integrate, as appropriate, the VRIN characteristics (valuable, rare, inimitable, and non-substitutable) in your discussion of the four critical resources listed below. Each critical resource should be discussed separately.
When Step 7 is complete, prepare your findings for inclusion in the final report. Then proceed to Step 8.
Step 8: Examine 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 at 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.
Read the resources below and prepare a summary and analysis of how each principle applies to your organization. (If you believe one of these topics is not relevant for your organization, you may be able to skip it. Before making this decision, consult with your professor):
· management and leadership styles and effectiveness
· organizational leadership
When you have completed Steps 7 and 8, follow the instructions in Step 12 to submit them for feedback in the Assignments folder. Then proceed to Step 9, where you will review the elements of a SWOT analysis.
Step 9: Evaluate 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 portions.
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. Then proceed to Step 10.
Step 10: Explore Capacity for Learning and Change
The last step before working on all your conclusions and recommendations 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 and 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.
Think about your organization’s attempts to improve its performance in key areas. If the organization has tried to make changes in key areas, were the attempts a success or a failure? Explain the reasons you associate with the organization’s success in making changes or the organization’s failure to succeed. (If you cannot identify any attempts by your organization to make changes, think of a key area in your organization that could be improved and briefly explain the reasons you think your organization would succeed or fail if an attempt to make changes in that area was launched.)
For further guidance, read these resources on organizational change and learning organizations.
When Step 10 is complete, prepare your findings for inclusion in your final report. Then proceed to Step 11.
Step 11: Form Conclusions and Recommendations
It's time to wrap everything up. You will now finalize your situation audit report by making recommendations based on the conclusions and research that you've done.
In priority order, with one (1) being the highest rank, list and explain, in no more than a few sentences for each conclusion, your report’s 3 to 5 most important conclusions. Follow each conclusion with a specific recommendation that is expressed in no more than a few sentences.
Once discussed with senior management, these recommendations and conclusions may form the basis of future strategic plans and objectives for your organization.
When you have finished this step, continue to Step 12 to submit your final situation audit report.
Step 12: Submit Your Work
Make a note of the recommended delivery dates in the table below and submit your situation audit report in the dropbox at the bottom of this page.
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.
|
Step # |
Submission week |
Deliverable |
File-naming protocol |
|
Step 3 |
Week 2 |
· Organizational overview/Fact sheet · Mission, vision, values, and goals |
· lastname_firstname_organizational_overview_factsheet.docx · lastname_firstname_mission.docx |
|
Step 6 |
Week 3 |
· Organizational strategy and analysis |
· lastname_firstname_org_strategy_and_analysis.docx |
|
Step 8 |
Week 4 |
· Critical resources · Leadership, governance, management |
· lastname_firstname_crit_resources.docx · lastname_firstname_leadership_ governance_mangt_.docx |
|
Step 12 |
Week 5 |
· Final situation audit report |
· lastname_firstname_audit_ final_report.docx |
When you submit your project, your work will be evaluated using the competencies listed below. You can use the list below to self-check your work before submission.
· 1.3: Provide sufficient, correctly cited support that substantiates the writer’s ideas.
· 1.6: Follow conventions of Standard Written English.
· 6.3: Analyze an organization's internal strengths and weaknesses for strategic value.
· 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.
· 9.2: Evaluate how human capital serves as a source of competitive advantage.
Take Action
Submit your assignment to your instructor for review and feedback.
