The company is TEND

The purpose of a business report is to present information in a clear and structured manner, helping decision-makers understand and evaluate information to make informed decisions. Your business report is going to recommend to the top management team what to do next based on the information you provide. Your report needs to be logical, supported by evidence and persuasive.

Length:

Rather than thinking about an overall word count, the following is expected for each section:

• Executive summary: one page
• Introduction and strategic analysis: The resubmission of your assessment one is expected to be 8 typed pages, but must not exceed 10 pages
• Options, evaluation and recommendation: This is expected to be 4 pages in length but must not exceed 6 pages.

Each of the headings below should start on a new page.

Report Structure:

Title page

• The title page must clearly state which option and name of the company you choose.
• Your Name and student ID should be on the title page.
• Give the project report a name
• Name the audience (that is the board of directors or senior management team as you choose)
• Identify yourself (and, if in role, the consulting company you represent).

Executive summary

Your executive summary provides the summary of the entire strategic document (including a summary of recommendations to the board).

Contents page

This is self-explanatory, however, students do forget sometimes to put in the page numbers for the various headings! Check your work before you submit it!

1. Introduction

As before in A1.

2. Strategic analysis

As before this section of your assignment should be a comprehensive analysis of the organization’s position in respect of its industry, macroenvironment and in relation to its competition. Detailed analysis should be reflected in tables attached as appendices to your assignment. Pick out the most relevant facts from your analysis and discuss/justify and substantiate these in the text of your assignment.

This is Part One of your assignment and is based on a rework of your first assignment. Grades for Assessment One will vary from the A range through to an occasional D or even E. Those with poor grades in the first assessment have the opportunity to fully rework this part and re-present it. Those awarded high grades in the first assessment may have much less work to do here other than tweak or further improve what is already a strong analysis.

The changes you make will be informed by the feedback from assessment one but are not necessarily limited to this feedback. As you work on Part Two, for example, you may realise there are further changes or improvements that need to be made to Part One in order to produce and present an integrated strategic document from start to finish.

Please note that we do not have in mind a perfect set of analysis conclusions for this section and we do not expect all submissions to effectively arrive at the same conclusions. There are matters of fact for the organisation which cannot be ignored, but the most important evaluation of your work will be on the strength of your analysis, the logic of your conclusions, and the weight of your evidence. In the real world there are few right answers, rather only better or worse ones, with the best of the better ones being excellent.

It is essential that you highlight what you have changed in the strategic analysis since the first assessment. Any board or senior management team would expect to quickly identify improvements and adjustments on re-presented work after feedback. Examples of what you might do could be to highlight text that is new or changed in yellow. You could use track changes – but if you do, use this very carefully so your document does not end up looking too messy. You may think of a better way to do identify changes and we will leave it to you to decide how best to do this.

3. Strategic options

This section of your assignment deals directly with the key issues facing the organization and explore options the company can consider as strategic options. This requires the correct identification of the issues from the previous section and your own thinking about suitable alternatives that will enable the organization to formulate a strategic plan from the solutions you provide.

Remember, there is no straightforward ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ strategic option and a blend of solutions could be appropriate as a strategy for the organization. You need to focus on the issue (or issues), examine it from a number of perspectives and creatively think about possible solutions. Our focus in marking your work here is whether or not you are applying strategic thinking to the problems facing the case organization and whether you can argue and substantiate the solutions you provide as recommendations.

4. Evaluation

On what basis should strategic options be chosen or prioritised? This section is where you propose and then use a strategic evaluation framework. Which options are mutually exclusive? Which can work together? Which options can work one after the other? What is the organisations mission and overall strategy and which options will best support or further this? Are there pragmatic considerations? Does the organisation have the resources, whether people or competence, to choose any or all of these options.

These are the sorts of questions you can consider, but we will leave it to you to develop and use an evaluation framework. Sometimes the evaluation highlights areas of concern that the organisation can then solve.

5. Recommendations

The recommendations you make must follow strategically from the previous discussion and offer a compelling argument for the recommended strategic options. Recommendations need to be grouped according to whether they are short term or long term. The expected outcome of adopting each recommendation must be provided as well as identifying important issues or challenges that adoption might raise (or problems that will need to be solved). Further, you might include contingencies, which are alternative strategic options that might be followed if the primary solution partially or totally fails.

Remember you are making recommendations to the board, but the final decision is theirs to make. Frame up this section so that the board has the information it needs to support the discussion and decisions it needs to make.

6. References

Presented in APA 7th, that is in alphabetical order with a hanging indent