Airasia Vision

FIN 469
FINANCIAL STRATEGY

Coursework
(September 2008)

Analyzing Organizations Strategically

Overview of Organizational Strategic Analysis Projects

The strategic analysis projects are designed to allow you to analyze organizational and business situations and to make and justify recommendations to improve the company.   Necessary or desired information will always be missing, but you must make proper assumptions and judgments based on what you can find.   In this regard, such projects simulate real business environments; business leaders and strategists never have all the information they would like.   To compensate, you should make reasonable assumptions and state them clearly. Make decisions based on the information available and seek out other resources if appropriate.

There is a wide range of approaches and analytical methods that can be applied—many have been covered in class. The following guidelines are only intended to provide some ideas of how you might approach analyzing an organization.   Note that analytical tools that are covered in the course should be utilized extensively and in the proper ways.

An organizational analysis is like a puzzle, where the challenge is to take different pieces of information and logically piece it together to develop a picture of the business. The first step in analyzing an organization is to identify the relevant major issues. Then you should dissect the situation, crunch the numbers, establish relationships among the information, make comparisons, and develop ratios and percentages. Try to spot trends, both good and bad. Identify items that do not follow the trend line and determine reasons for this. When the issues involve future plans, such as the establishment of a business or a change in business directions, make sure the numbers and the time frames for developing revenues and implementation are realistic. Also make sure all expense factors, including the indirect cost of the recommendations such as...