Development and Implementation of Strategy

• you will focus ONLY on ONE SBU selected by you and design all functional strategies for this SBU in Part II: Implementation of Strategy and in Part III: Evaluation and Control. Please make sure you select the most interesting and promising SBU, that is worth investing in by the company.  Yes in most situations the strategic plan covers all sbu but we want you to finish your plan this semester.

You will start this assignment with the stakeholder analysis to assess the resources of the firm, then the TOWS matrix, in order to identify the corporate strategy (see chapter 8-10) and then based on the corporate strategy, identify the business level strategy for each sbu.  then include your  “across border”  strategy (or world market strategy) if serving beyond domestic market. Discuss company benefits and risks associated with the recommended  strategy.  I use the term world market because an organization competing across borders may not use what is called a global strategy but may choose to use one of the others listed in chapter 10.

Once you select the sbu for which you want to focus your plan you will identify the functional strategies needed to implement these corporate and business level strategies. ,  To implement your solution or business level strategy you need to consider how to allocation your resources. These include the organizational (including marketing, operations, and innovations- can be R&D or IT or both), financial, human resources, and other requirements that will go into making sure the organization has the competencies for sustainability (think about how Barney and other strategists talk about making sure that resources are rare, valuable, not imitated, and that processes are complex) . You will also want to consider the characteristics of both your leaders and employees needed to support your solution. I would suggest looking at the Competing Values Framework and the culture of the organization to optimize you implementation of your strategy. The final part of your implementation plan will also include the full organizational structure and design needed to support your corporate and business level strategies. Chapters 6 & 8-10 in Rothaermel  describe the corporate and business level strategies. Resources found in this module can be used to review the functional strategies learned in your MBA program.

Did you remember to do most or all these things:

Begin With the stakeholder analysis to help you think about the resources of the firm and

then develop your own Corporate and

your own Business Level for Each Sbu and

if Serving Markets Beyond Domestic What World Market Strategy Will You Use – show how synergistic with SWOT, VRIO and competitive position from assignment 1.

Now that you have defined your strategy, you need to thing about how to implement that strategy. This is not what the firm has already been doing but how you plan on moving forward with the strategy that you have identified to solve the strategy problem. Thus this assignment should demonstrate your ability to critically evaluate the situation, allocate human capital, and apply decision making tools. For example, you may have been working on a multi-attribute problem for which the trade-offs (more profit, less risk, better strategic fit, better strategic platform for the future, etc.) are not well defined. In that case, you may want to offer multiple solutions, each better at achieving different sub-goals, and choose the optimum choice using decision making theory. You may also want to apply decision making theory to help narrow down multiple and equally good solutions to the problem.

Identify Markets to be served for your SBU for which you will be describing the implementation of the strategy above (be clear which sbu you plan to be the focus for this part of the strategy plan) – be consistent with strategy and mission

Allocation of resources: financial and human through your functional strategies:

Functional Strategies:

Marketing (markets to be served and the marketing strategy – either the growth strategies or stability strategies,

Operations – think in terms of resources and how they will be best managed for an operations strategy,

R&D (only if applicable),

Finance (how you will fund the strategy and its implementation)

IT/MIS (systems that you will use to support the above strategies –

HR Types of employees and managers – use the CVF for leadership types,

Culture as defined by the CVF (Competing Values Framework) of the organization

The final part of your implementation plan will also include the full organizational structure and design needed to support your corporate and business level strategies (think of how you will structure the organization based on its corporate/generic strategies, business level and world market.)

for all of the above functional strategies, explain how these strategies support your Corporate Strategy and business level strategy-

Please remember to apply theoretical models (as frameworks) for presenting relevant functional strategies, For example for the Marketing strategy – I am not interested in the tactics of the 4Ps but the strategies that you would use for your 4Ps, do not describe the tactics. The same goes for the other functional strategies: Do not include HR functions for HR strategies but instead what should your workforce look like, for IT, what are the systems that you need to ensure operational excellence; for finance, later you will create a full P&L statement now what are the sources of financing, investments, capital structure, working capital for finance… (those are also referred briefly in your textbook, chapter 11 (Rothaermel) However, we expect you to apply what you learned in previous   relevant courses of the MBA program).