Part 1

Draft a management report outlining your strategic recommendations for Ooni. Your report should draw on appropriate B302 module material and provide evidence that supports your recommendations.

(Maximum 1200 word)

Guidance notes

Part 1

Part 1 asks you to produce a management report outlining strategic recommendations that you would offer Ooni's management team. You should prepare the report as if you were a consultant submitting recommendations to Ooni. You must think about what your target audience needs to know and write in a way that its members are likely to find interesting and relevant.

You should be sensitive to the difference between what Ooni's executives already know and how your strategic recommendations might affect their established way of doing things.

While your strategic recommendations may build on ideas developed in the collaborative activity, you are free to develop alternative strategic recommendations.

Think carefully about the style and structure of your report. It should include an executive summary of around 150 words (included in the word limit for Part 1), clearly defined subsections and accurate referencing.

Your recommendations should be succinct and coherent. Markers will assess your capacity to connect theory with practice. You should draw on relevant B302 module material and be clear about how recommendations relate to business strategy and corporate strategy.

Given the word limit, three recommendations may be sensible. You must show you can balance appropriate depth with appropriate breadth. If you make too many recommendations, you may have too few words available to discuss each recommendation in sufficient depth.

Block 5

This collaborative activity gives you an opportunity to consolidate your learning on B302. With guidance and support from your tutor, you will work in small groups with other students.

Your tutor will share on the tutor-group forum specific instructions related to the group work (e.g. collaborative activity tutorials, the required deliverable and how to submit and present your groupwork) along with some suggestions on how to enhance the collaboration. In this area, you will find the materials necessary to complete the collaborative activity (Parts 1 and 2) and also the material related to the implementation of strategic recommendations that you will use in preparation for the EMA (Part 3). The case study for the collaborative activity is Ooni, a Scottish pizza oven manufacturing company.

The collaborative activity is structured in three parts, to reflect the three core areas of strategic management that you learnt about in Week 1Section 6: strategic analysis, decision making and strategy in action. In Part 1 Strategic analysis, you will conduct a strategic analysis of Ooni in your group. In Part 2 Decision making, you will evaluate Ooni's corporate and business strategies and develop strategic recommendations for the company with your group. Part 3 is dedicated to implementation and you will work on that individually, looking at the relationship between strategy, structure and culture at Ooni and developing implementation plans through which to execute your strategic decisions.

Your tutor will be in touch with you to communicate who you are going to work with. You can work collaboratively with your team intwo ways accessible here:

1. A team forum.
2. A virtual room on Adobe Connect. In this virtual room you can upload a document and discuss it with other students. You can find guidance on how to use this room in the'Online rooms guide for students'.

If you have participated in the collaborative exercise in Block 3, you will already be familiar with the forum and the Adobe Connect virtual room.

In addition, between Week 23 and Week 28, there willl be three planned meetings with your tutor: in the first two, your tutor will support the groups in working on the collaborative activity; in the last meeting, each group will present their finished work to the other groups. These meetings are very important occasions to discuss with your tutor and receive feedback. Active participation in these events is also important to develop your collaborative skills, which will be an object of reflection in the EMA.