FINAL REPORT ASSIGNMENT OVERVIEW

Objective

The goal of this assignment is for students to learn and improve upon professional writing skills. Students will accomplish this as they compose various professional documents that will be fused into a final client report. The assignment is further detailed below in the Assignment section.

This project will teach students to think and write both critically and analytically. Students will focus on improving their writing skills primarily relating to grammar, vocabulary, organization, structure, style, flow, tone and formatting. Additionally, students will increase their general business knowledge and acumen.

Students will learn how to “tell a story” by writing each sentence with purpose, not to fill space. Thoughts and sentences should be structured logically and chronologically.  Students will also learn to differentiate between instances where strictly facts should be used and instances where persuasive language, opinions, and recommendations are appropriate.

This assignment is intended to mimic the business world in every way possible. The professional standards, documents, deadlines, feedback, and activities will parallel the conditions and expectations present in the business world today.

ASSIGNMENT

Helping a Company Strategize for the Future

The remainder of the semester’s writing assignments and most classwork will be devoted to your final project:  A brief company and industry analysis, delivered from a strategy perspective.

You will be asked to place yourself in the role of a marketing/strategy advisor for a publicly-traded company that is looking for fresh advice on how it can grow its business in the Massachusetts-New England-Northeastern U.S. market (choose the market you feel most appropriate for your company).

In order to do this, the company is engaging you as a consultant to recommend its strategy for growth in this market.

• The company’s health is to be determined via a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) Analysis. The SWOT Analysis concept was developed in the 1960s (development credited to Albert Humphrey and a team of researchers at Stanford University) and is commonly used today in marketing and business strategy.
• The industry’s health is to be determined using the well-known, 35-year-old “Five Forces” model devised by Michael Porter, an economist, and professor at Harvard Business School. The model is fully titled “The Five Forces that Shape Industry Competition” and is well known in the business strategy planning field.

As part of this engagement, each student is responsible for drafting their own report for the client. It is a student’s job to analyze their company and articulate the findings to the client in a professional report.

The report will be emailed to the client as an attachment, including a professional email. The final client email should summarize the results of the report in a clear, concise and comprehensive manner. Typically in business writing, less is more!

There is no specific page length for the final report. However, appropriate page ranges are detailed below. The ranges are for text only, formatted in the standard business format used in this course. Page ranges also exclude any length added by charts, figures, and graphs. Although, the use of charts, figures and graphs are required.

Students should concentrate on writing in a clear, concise and comprehensive fashion. Additionally, considerable effort should be made to review feedback from prior coursework and apply it to future assignments.

At the end of the semester, each student will complete a short presentation outlining their report to the client.  The PowerPoint presentation must include, the introduction of the company; both graphs, figures or charts; a summary of your growth strategy; SWOT; Five Forces; an interesting fact about the company.  Can include other information as appropriate.

Your new client – this company – has asked for a seven-page report (plus email and graphs, figures or charts) containing:

1. One page for your biography (does not have to fill an entire page)
2. Professional email summarizing the results to the client (include: subject line, salutation, approximately 3 or 4 short paragraphs summarizing your brilliant idea for expansion into North East/New England/MA, closing.)
3. One-half to one page Executive Summary
4. Two pages for Company Analysis using SWOT
5. Two pages for Industry Analysis using the Five Forces approach
6. One page containing your strategy-for-growth recommendations
7. 2 total (graphs, figures or charts). These should be placed where appropriate.

PLEASE USE THIS ORDER FOR YOUR FINAL WORD DOCUMENT TO ME AT THE END OF THE SEMESTER.  PUT ALL BULLETED ITEMS IN ONE WORD DOCUMENT TO ME SEPARATED BY EACH TITLE.

Consider the above bullet points to be a basic Report Outline, open to customization. The short length requested suggests the need for concise work.  While appropriate detail will distinguish your chosen company from other similar companies in this industry and market will be necessary, you should not get lost in detail but use the requested approaches to focus on the big question, which is, “How can this company position itself best for growth in the current economic climate, in the Mass./New England/Northeastern U.S. market, given competitive forces and the state of the industry it’s in.”

The client needs the report by Wednesday, Nov. 16 (Final Due Date).  We will discuss the SWOT and Five Forces models, and types of information you should include in each, more fully in class in the next few weeks.  You may have studied these concepts in other classes; feel free to draw on that material if you have.  Also, feel free to Google these concepts in the meantime.