Strategic Management and Assessment aims to equip learners with an understanding of different types of business strategies and how these can be appropriately chosen and deployed in business organisations.
Main Topics of Study:
Nature of Strategic Management
- Strategic management-definition, stages of strategic management, adapting to change
- Key terms in strategic management-competitive advantage, strategists, vision and mission statements, external opportunities and threats, internal strengths and weaknesses, objectives, strategies, policies
- Strategic management model
- Benefits of strategic management-financial, non-financial
- Reluctance to do strategic planning-reasons
- Pitfalls in strategic planning
- Business ethics and strategic management-ethical behaviour, training programs
- Comparing business and military strategy
- Global competition-advantages and disadvantages of global competition
Business Vision and Mission
- Developing a mission statement-process
- Importance of vision and mission statements-resolving divergent views
- Characteristics of a mission statement-declaration of attitude, a customer orientation, declaration of social policy
- Components of a mission statement
External Assessment
- Nature of an external audit-key external forces, process of an external audit, economic forces, social/cultural/demographic and environmental forces, political, governmental and legal forces, technological forces, competitive forces
- Sources of external information-media, the Internet
- Forecasting tools and techniques
- Competitive analysis- competitive intelligence programs, cooperation among competitors, Porter’s five forces model
- Industry analysis-the external factor evaluation matrix, the competitive profile matrix
Internal Assessment
- Nature of an internal audit-key internal factors, process
- Resource-based view
- integrating strategy and culture
- Relationships among functional areas
- Management-planning, organising, motivating, staffing, controlling
- Marketing-customer analysis, selling products/services, product and service planning, pricing, distribution, marketing research, opportunity analysis
- Finance-functions, ratios
- Productions/operations-process, capacity, inventory, workforce, quality
- R&D internal and external
- management information systems-strategic planning software, knowledge management
- Value chain analysis-definition, process, benchmarking
- Internal factor evaluation matrix-purpose, content, process
Example Candidate Response Booklet
Example Candidate Response (ECR) Booklets are a source of crucial information for Centres and Candidates as they use real candidate responses. We ask Senior Examiners to comment on five or more responses in terms of why the mark was awarded with commentary about how to improve the answer (if necessary).
