The Assignment

The purpose of the project is to provide the students an opportunity to examine the nature and dynamics of strategic management efforts being undertaken by the contemporary organizations. The students will be working in (self-managed) teams of up to four (4) students for this project. You must work on both of the following (two) projects;

Project Option I

The team(s) will choose a company operating successfully in the GCC region and will perform an in-depth analysis of this entity (along with the industry in which it is operating) focusing upon the key dimensions of its strategic management effort. The scope/size of the project organization does not matter - i.e. it could be as small as a (single) retail outlet operating in just one city or as large as an MNE - what matters the most is the technical accuracy (i.e., how well does the team apply strategic management concepts learned in the course). The specific task at hand is to collect information relating to various components of strategic management effort using options such as: (1) The teams could approach a firm and gather information/data through direct interactions (face-2-face, telephone, mail etc.) with the appropriate officials in that firm; (2) they could gather relevant information/data from secondary sources like web, company documents or research reports. However, it is advisable for the teams to prefer the first option for gathering the data/information as it may eventually lead to superior learning and evaluation outcomes.

Project Option II

After having scanned the local business environment of Jeddah, the team will set up a business concern and develop a strategic business plan for it. The entity selected for this purpose could be anything like a restaurant, amusement park, fitness studio (may be for females), sports complex, hospital, or business school etc. While reporting, the elements constituting the external environment and the opportunities and threats posed by this external environment have to be as factual and logical as possible. However, for the internal environment, the team can make reasonable assumptions while elaborating upon the strengths and weaknesses of the hypothetical concern while making an appeal to the resource-based view (RBV) of the firms. The strategic plan needs to exhaustively take into account the elements like environmental analysis (SWOT), strategy, implementation and contingencies etc.

The deliverable of the team project would be 15-20 pages Formal Report. The required font for the text is "Times New Roman" in font size 12 pts. with standard character spacing. Line spacing is 1.5 lines