Service Development Team Project

Coffee on the Go Project

This is a team project.  The purpose of this project is for your team to propose a new service offering. Strong projects will be original and creative, with strong empiric evidence of potential viability. This project has a set of key deliverables:

• The outline of the service itself. This section should include, but is not limited to, the following points of discussion:
  1. What is the current unmet or underserved need of consumers?
  2. What is the current (imperfect) solution that consumers are selecting in the absence of your offering?
  3. Competitive analysis – who are the main competitors, what do they offer, what are their strengths and weaknesses relative to your proposed company?
  4. Consumer analysis – who are the consumers that you will be focusing on as your target market?
  5. Full description of your service offering
  6. Marketing plan (4+3 P’s)
  7. Complete service blueprint for your service
• Empiric support (primary research)
  1. Research should focus on customer perceptions of both current offerings as well as your proposed offering.
  2. Research can take the form of one or more of the following:
     1. Focus groups
     2. Depth interviews

• Survey

1. Experiment

1. Research results should be presented in a manner appropriate to the method of research employed, and should have enough data points (i.e., participants) to be convincing and representative

• Financial feasibility
  1. This section consists of a series of projections, including:
     1. Price being charged
     2. Variable costs incurred

• Fixed/Overhead costs

1. Anticipated sales volume (first year, second year, third year)
2. Venture profitability projections based on the above

1. Please note that while these projections will be primarily estimates, I would like you to provide strong justification/rationale for these estimates

Project charter:  Objectives enumerated, approach planned (what do you plan to do), timeline; (1-2 pages long).  In completing the proposal remember:

1. You need to clearly explain to me what your service idea is and why you think it could be successful
2. Establish roles within the team (e.g., project leader, research leader, etc.). Effective teams are ones in which all members have clearly outlined responsibilities.
3. What is your proposed research approach to support the viability of your plan?
4. Decide on timeline and what to do first
5. I need to approve the business you outline before you begin.

Final papers:

The body is likely to be 15-20 pages long, double-spaced, 1” margins, 12-point Times New Roman font (10 pages minimum, 20 pages is the maximum, and includes any figures and tables, but does not include title page or citations).

Use the material from the class on research methods and the text and readings on what firms need to do to be a strong service provider. Use this information to help you in evaluating how well the competition is doing on service as well as how effectively you could address any of their shortcomings. Use references to note where you are drawing this information from unless it is from your head or from your own research. Your paper should fully elaborate on research methods used.

Peer Evaluation: Alongside your paper submission, you will evaluate the participation of your group members. Remember, lack of participation will significantly damage your project grade. I reserve the right to assign a grade of zero on this project to any individual who receives an average score of 2 or less out of 5.

Presentation:

You will have an opportunity to present your project as a group to the rest of the class at the end of the semester. Presentations will be approximately 10-12 minutes, with time for questions. All group members are expected to present in a manner consistent with a business presentation. This means that you should not have cue cards, should not be reading verbatim off of slides, and should be engaging the audience with energy and eye contact. 

Grading: Project charter 25 pts., Class presentation 50 pts., Written paper 150 pts., Peer review 25 pts. Total 250 pts.