Determinants for Effective Strategy

INSTRUCTIONS:
Address the key questions of capacity planning from a general perspective as they relate to the chosen department and strategy. Describe how the determinants of effective capacity could impact the chosen strategy. Illustrate how you would forecast the necessary capacity of the chosen department. Explain how you would measure the capacity of the chosen department. What metrics would you employ to inform leadership? Briefly describe the steps of the capacity planning process you would apply relative to the chosen strategy and department. Finally, argue what could be outsourced given the demands may exceed our capacity.
There is no minimum or maximum in terms of the word count; however, the response should explicitly address all required components of this discussion assignment. The document should be prepared consistent with the APA writing style and reflect higher-level cognitive processing (analysis, synthesis, and or evaluation).
Based upon a careful review of the available literature, the student is to consider him or herself to be a department manager of Kibby and Strand (fictitious clothing company).
Students are to choose a capacity planning strategy. Students will also choose a department from the Receiving, Production, or Shipping departments to apply the strategy and create a plan to determine and manage the department’s capacity. Explain how the plan and the decisions made using the plan will be strategic.
Prepare a memo to the COO briefly explaining the strategy along with the justification of the strategy. You are requesting approval of the strategy. Follow APA style and embed the memo in the body of the paper.
ADDITIONAL INSTRUCTIONS FROM THE PROFESSOR:
This week you’re preparing a Capacity Planning Strategy Plan for one of Kibby and Strand’s three departments, and you get to choose which one. Below is the capacity utilization model from Chapter 5 of the textbook, and it can be a challenge to implement that into a real operational process. To implement the model you have to come up with a formula to calculate capacity for the operational process you’re analyzing. This is an involved process and I have attached an example of how you might do this for the Receiving Department of Kibby and Strand.
Utilization = Actual output / Design capacity x 100%
You’re writing a capacity planning strategy plan, so the plan needs to direct the staff how to perform capacity planning for a department. The intent of the plan is not to inform the staff of what capacity planning is, they probably already know that. Rather the plan contains the steps the staff must do to determine the capacity of a particular department, and the staff will execute the steps in the plan to do this.
This leads me to Napoleon’s Corporal writing style. When directing staff you need to be specific so even the least experienced staff member in the department understands it. This is not easy because we have been conditioned to write academic papers that inform the reader. Now we’re directing the reader to do something, and this is harder than writing to inform. Check out this link and you can research other articles on Napoleon’s Corporal. http://awealthofcommonsense.com/2016/04/napoleons-corporal/
If your least experienced staff member in a department does not understand a plan then it is likely others do not as well and the plan needs to be revised.

YouTube video demonstrating Kibby & Strand simulation – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gf-BJdmoLFY