MBA 520 Final Project Guidelines and Rubric

Overview

Businesses and other organizations must regularly measure their financial performance and health in order to make operational and strategic decisions affecting

the organizations future. Management professionals utilize income statements, balance sheets, cash flow statements, and a limitless variety of other reports and

techniques to evaluate an organization. They also work closely with professionals from departments across the organizationincluding marketing, human

resources, and operationsto ensure that the business runs smoothly and that financial decisions are not made in isolation.

For this project, you will use the accounting and finance skills you learned in the course to review the past and current financial performance and health of a

global, publicly traded company. Based on that analysis, you will create initial financial projections that forecast the companys performance under different

scenarios and identify internal risks and opportunities in order to begin planning future activities.

This assessment addresses the following course outcomes: Assess organizations underlying financial performance and health by analyzing relevant financial statements, variances, ratios, and other financial

information

Draw connections between accounting and financial information and the broader organizational context for making integrated business decisions

Assess critical factors driving financial risks and opportunities for informing management priorities

Forecast business performance under different assumptions about inputs and processes using simple financial models

Evaluate the internal costs and benefits of business opportunities for their impact on budgeting and business decisions

Communicate financial analyses clearly and coherently for persuading internal stakeholders of the validity of observations and conclusions Prompt

Imagine you are a newly hired manager at a publicly traded, global corporation of your choosing. (Your instructor must approve your choice. You may also choose

a non-publicly traded organization, if your instructor verifies that the organization has sufficient financial information available to complete the project.)

You have been asked to review the companys past and current financial performance and health and make initial financial projections in order to begin planning

for the upcoming year. Your supervisor is particularly interested in a fresh perspective on what your analysis reveals about potential risks and opportunities, as

well as recommendations for next steps. Because you will eventually need to convince internal stakeholders, including senior management, of the feasibility and

desirability of your suggested activities, it is important that you justify your projections and recommendations, explaining how they were informed by existing

information and modeling different scenarios.

Your financial analysis and projection report will include several financial tables, along with a comprehensive narrative describing the organizations context,

financial performance and health, and your analytical approach and conclusions. Your report should be geared toward an executive audience with basic

accounting and finance knowledge and should be well organized, clear, concise, convincing, and free of distracting errors. Note that, in addition to the organizations financial statements and website, other authoritative news sourcessuch as annual reports and external sites like Bloomberg.commay offer

insights that facilitate analysis or provide information on the organizations priorities, challenges, and geographic distribution.

Specifically, your financial analysis and projection report must include the following critical elements:

I. Executive Summary. Clearly and concisely summarize your principal findings, projections, and recommendations with an eye to persuading busy executives

to support your ideas and to read further. II. Approach. Provide your intended audience with a solid, but brief, sense of the parameters of your analysis and who else you would consult in refining it

further and why. Remember, your goal is to convince readers of the validity of your observations, while recognizing limitations that affect business

decisions. III. Financial Performance and Health. In this section, you will evaluate the organizations recent financial performance and current financial health, given its

organizational context. In particular, you must cover:

A. Organizational Context

1. What key features of the organization (e.g., major products or services, customers, location, etc.) help set the boundaries for business

decisions? In other words, what key goods or services does your organization provide, for whom, where, and why?

2. How is the company organized and managed (e.g., by product groups, geographic region, function, etc.)? How does that affect

accounting and financial information and subsequent business decisions?

B. Recent Financial Performance

1. Assess what the organizations consolidated income statements for the last three years say about its financial performance. Use relevant

indicators, graphs, and spreadsheets to support your narrative. (Include all spreadsheets in an appendix.) For example, what do the

amounts and year-to-year changes in revenue, operating income, net profit or loss, and Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation,

and Amortization tell you? Do any items stand out?

2. Assess what the organizations consolidated cash flow statements for the same time period say about its financial performance.