Assignment – Mastering Strategic Consulting

 
Assignment – Mastering Strategic Consulting
 
This is a long document. Please read, and reread. And discuss.
 
Your assignment paper should take the form of a consultant proposal. You should write to the client.
 
Your goal in your paper is build the trust and confidence of your client in you, so that they will be willing to take you up on your proposal. The proposal must therefore be professional, effective, efficient and acceptable.
 
Your client must see that you understand ‘business’, that you understand their business, that you understand their problems and needs, and that you are a capable consultant who can converse comfortably with top management.
 
Clients don’t want an ‘academic’ paper. Your proposal must communicate everything that needs to be said in a quick and easy-to-read way. The paper requires an economy of language, with short sentences, short words, and an absence of non-essential jargon. It should pass the readability test. (Look online for free readability tests.) Make use of charts, tables and graphics. Have a look at business sections in newspapers, magazines, online blogs, etc. Look at how business journalists write about organisations.
 
When we say we don’t want an ‘academic’ paper, this does not mean you should ignore references to authors of the concepts and tools you use. For example, if you use Porter’s five forces framework, then you should say so. You might write something like, “Using Porter’s five forces framework (1979), it can be seen that the industry that Company X operates in is……….” If you are a good consultant (!), you might say something like, “Using Porter’s five forces framework (1979) but updated by Tony Grundy (2006) in ‘Rethinking and reinventing Michael Porter’s five forces model’, it can be seen that the industry that Company X operates in is……….”
 
Your proposal should be accurate and objective. Your analysis of the current situation MUST be based on facts such as available hard data and information from reputable industry reports; of lot such hard data is available if you search for it. If you have the opportunity to have an initial conversation with the client, you should include information from that. Where this is not possible, or where some facts are not readily available, this should be noted in the proposal, for example by explicitly stating, ‘It is unknown whether….’ And in the recommendations section of the proposal you should state, ‘It is recommended to collect more facts about…..’ It is better to say something is unknown than to make a guess.
 
Observations, conclusions and recommendations need to be made objectively. They must be based on the facts presented. Conclusions range according to their level of certainty, from, “It can certainly be concluded that…..” to “It is possible to conclude that…….” Using language carefully will increase your credibility as a consultant; it is important to communicate the right degree of certainty in your observations and conclusions.
 
You can however express personal opinions, based on your expertise and experience elsewhere, and even based on your intuition, but these need to be flagged up so the client does not mistake them for conclusions based on facts. You can say, for example, “The situation is similar to what I have seen before, so I think that….”, “In my experience, this means that….”, “In the absence of clear facts, my sense is that…..”
 
Proposals can range from speculative proposals, in situations where you are an outsider and you have little inside knowledge of the organisation and limited access to industry data, to more concrete proposals that you might expect from an internal consultant.
 
Your varied access to hard data and industry reports will mean that proposals will be more or less concrete and more or less detailed. Whatever the situation, even if there are gaps and there are a number of personal opinions expressed, your proposal must have a clear internal logic that means it makes sense. Remember, your goal is to ‘build the trust and confidence of your client in you, so that they will be willing to take you up on your proposal.’
 
Your proposal must be sensitive to the feelings and political issues of the potential client, or it may not be accepted by them. Wherever possible, you should try to estimate and address any possible negative reaction by the client. For example, the client might think something is excellent, but your analysis and conclusion might be that it is actually poor. You must find the language to communicate the reality so that the reader will accept it.
 
The assignment has four parts:
 
Part 1) A critical review of the current strategic position of an organisation of your choice, reflecting on past and current antecedent activities and providing an analysis of emergent strategies and/or strategic perspectives. (Approximately 45% of the proposal.)
 
In effect, this means an analysis of the industry the organisation operates in, and an analysis of the position of the organisation in the industry. You need as much hard data as you can get. This section should form the main part of your proposal. Divide Part 1 into two elements:
 
a) Analysis of the industry (the industry that the organisation operates in):
 
–          industry boundaries (it is not always straightforward to define the industry the potential client organisation operates in)
–          PESTLE
–          five forces
–          analysis of key players (a competitor analysis)
–          KSFs (key success factors) needed to be successful in the industry
–          industry status (is it growing, stable, in decline, evolving, profitable)
 
b) Analysis of the organisation:
 
–          brief history of previous changes that the organisation has made to address changes in the industry, and the changes that have been made to the organisation’s mission and strategies. (What changes has the organisation made in the past to fit better with external changes in the industry?)
–          current situation, for example:
–          stated mission
–          stated vision and current plan/ploy
–          position in industry value chain
–          brand, reputation among customers
–          outline of the main company structure
–          products and services, and the value proposition offered to customers
–          customers, segments served
–          main competitors, competitive position (cost, differentiation, broad/narrow focus, blue ocean) and % of market held
–          organisational culture
–          performance (profitability, and/or mission achievement)
 
The above is a long but not complete list of concepts and tools you should consider using; you may use other concepts and tools as well.
 
Some of the above may be answered in a single sentence, while others may be worth paying more attention to. It is your job to determine the most appropriate structure of the analysis and the degree of detail to go into. Your choice will be based on the hard data you have readily available to you and what you believe will convince the client to engage further with you.
 
The assignment requires you to take a ‘critical’ approach.  This means you should:
 
–          weigh up the quality of the data you have available to you before reaching any conclusions
–          identify when the data is conflicting, and use your judgement to reach a considered conclusion
–          evaluate the potential client organisation’s performance – for example, to what extent is it meeting its mission? To what extent is it creating value? How does it compare with competitors? Are its strategies working? Answering these questions requires sensitivity.
 
You might think that your client will know all of the above. Maybe they will know a lot, but often they will have the knowledge but they will not have organised it to turn knowledge into understanding. You, as the potential consultant, can help them a) by organising all the bits and pieces into a clear and coherent view of the organisation and the world it operates in, and b) by bringing some fresh insight or new knowledge. (Look at the Belbin team roles – a strategic consultant is often expected to be a resource investigator and plant – https://www.belbin.com/about/belbin-team-roles/ )
 
Part 2a) A critical analysis (using a method, or methods, of your choice) of the organisation’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats and the determination of possible strategic options for the future direction of the organisation. You should justify any recommendation for strategic posture(s). (Approximately 25% of the proposal.)
 
You might as well use the SWOT/TOWS matrix. If you have done a thorough analysis of the industry and the organisation in Part 1, you will have much of the data needed to fill in the SWOT. Remember, if there are gaps in your knowledge or you have uncertainties, you must say so.
 
Do some reading about how to produce an effective SWOT/TOWS to make sure you don’t make the usual mistakes. You must avoid producing a long list of factors. You must identify the ‘critical few’ factors that are the most important and urgent, perhaps following the 80/20 Pareto rule, and you must prioritise.
 
You should provide a brief commentary giving your reasoning for the results.
 
You should then use the SWOT results to outline a number of possible corporate and business level strategic options; you are NOT expected to go into great detail about each one.   The TOWS framework is good for addressing the specific findings in the SWOT. You can use it to define a number of business level strategies to address the most important Ss, Ws, Os, and Ts. Bundled together, this may form a sufficient corporate level strategy in which the internal aspects of the organisation ‘fit’ with the external environment. (Achieving ‘strategic fit’ is one approach to strategy.) But, you should also be proposing options identifying alternative future states of the organisation, alternative visions of what the organisation should be doing, what it should look like in the next 3-5 years or so.
 
You can also use one or more other strategy frameworks for identifying strategic options, for example, Reeves et al’s 5 approaches to strategy, Porter’s generic strategies, scenario planning, Miles and Snow’s aggressiveness, Kim and Mauborgne’s blue ocean,  Ghemawat’s AAA framework, etc. Your choice of framework(s) will depend in part on the situation and what you think will be attractive to the potential client.
 
How many options to identify? You need at least two options to choose from; more than five options is difficult to handle.
 
You should make a brief assessment of the options; this will be an approximate assessment only. To make the assessment more systematic and objective, you should apply a framework, for example, SAF – Suitability, Acceptability, Feasibility, de Bono’s 6 Thinking Hats, a risk analysis model, etc.
 
Part 2b) A proposal outlining your recommendations/general approach to further develop a future strategy. (Approximately 10% of the proposal.)
 
In this part of your proposal, you are NOT making a recommendation for a particular strategy; you are making recommendations for what needs to be done by you and the client to ‘further develop a future strategy.’
 
You need to address questions such as:
 
–          Which aspects (‘problems’) of the organisation are the priorities to be addressed first?
–          What uncertainties identified in the proposal need to be addressed?
–          What further information needs to be collected to make the analysis in the proposal of the current situation, the SWOT and the identification of options accurate and complete?
–          What process of strategy development could be followed (who, how, what, when and where)?
–          What type of consulting relationship you can offer the client?
 
 
Part 3) A critical reflection on the concepts and tools used. (Approximately 20%)
 
In this Part, you are no longer writing a Proposal to a client; instead, you are required to ‘step back’ and look objectively and critically at the concepts and tools you used in Parts 1 and 2. This is an ‘academic’ piece of writing. You should look for research articles which have identified their strengths and weaknesses in practice, and compare what they say to your own experiences. You should make proper references to the research in your discussion.
 
As a result, if the client asks you as a consultant to explain why you have used the concepts and tools that you have, you will be able to do so.
 
 
Part 4) A consulting CV (résumé) as an appendix, highlighting specific projects and experience that evidence the skills you have to develop your strategic recommendations. (Part 4 does not count in the word count, and is not graded, but it MUST be included for the assignment to be passed.)
 
 
Executive Summary. When you have finished, write an Executive Summary. You place this at the start of your proposal. It should summarise what is in your proposal. It should be written in such a way to make the client want to read in more depth what you have to offer. In the Executive Summary, add a statement saying why you are making your proposal. For example, something like, “Company X has been growing rapidly but it is facing capacity limits in a number of areas. It needs to make a choice about the next steps, for example to continue rapid growth, which will entail risk of overstretching itself, or to take a break and consolidate its gains. Other options identified in this proposal are also available for consideration.” This is a form of ‘problem statement’.

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