Strategic Analysis
The purpose of the assignment is to give you an opportunity to deepen and personalise your learning on this module and to give you an opportunity to think about how the concepts you have been exploring can be applied in the working environment.
This is also an opportunity for you to ground your learning in relevant academic literature and to use this literature to inform and contextualise your assignment. I expect you to use a minimum of six relevant academic readings, three must be from those outlined in this handbook, and three can be from other relevant academic sources. No more than two may be Harvard Business Review articles. Beyond these minimal requirements, you are free to draw on any other relevant academic sources for your work.
This is a four-step assignment.
Step 1
You are required to interview a manager(s) of a cultural organisation to gain a comprehensive understanding of the organisation’s management processes as they relate to Strategy Risk People You may find that the organisation has no formal strategy in place, or their processes may be informal or organic in nature. Either way, your task is to fully understand how the organisation approaches these three aspects of organisational functioning. You must interview at least one and not more than two people from your chosen organisation.
Step 2
Based on the data collected and analysed in step 1, outline your theory of how the organisation functions at a management level. Do not simply feed back what your interviewee has told you but do include quotes from your interviewees rather than paraphrasing. Reflect on the observable data and use your academic reading and learning from the course to guide you in analysing the data and the themes emerging from the conversation(s). I expect you to use a minimum of six relevant academic readings, three must be from those outlined in this handbook, and three can be from other relevant academic sources. No more than two academic readings may be from the Harvard Business Review. Any of you wanting to get higher grades will need to use more than six relevant academic readings. Please note, relevant academic readings are those that appear in academic journals and readings so Youtube clips, FlipBoard entries and other popular articles do now qualify. Please ask me if you need clarification.
Your theory should be framed as a series of hypotheses about how the organisation approaches the three areas and be informed by the data collected and your academic reading. You are also free to use any tools you have learned during the course (such as PESTLE, SWOT or any of the people management tools). However, simply using these tools without explaining/contextualising them won’t suffice.
Step 3
On the basis of the data collected, and your analysis of it, draw some conclusions about how well (or not) the organisation is managing. Are there any gaps in the organisation’s strategy? If so, what might they be? If you were a consultant what suggestions would you give to the organisation to strengthen its management approaches across the three thematic areas? Remember, these suggestions and the basis on which they are made, must be linked to the evidence you have gathered from your interview data and backed up by academic readings. You must demonstrate these links in your assignment.
Step 4
Conclude the assignment by reflecting on what you have learned about
1. The organisation’s approach to management
2. How you used the theoretical concepts discussed in class during the course of the assignment
3. The relevant research literature that you read and reviewed
4. Insights for you as you think about your future arts management career
5. The process of doing the assignment
● Focus, substance and purpose: clear presentation of the organisation’s approach to management across the three areas.
● Capacity to analyse research data and hypothesise about the organisation’s approach to management.
● Informed reflection: making connections, seeing patterns, drawing conclusions about implication for you/practice
● Good analysis/synthesis/application of relevant academic literature
● Utilisation of class content, models, reading, discussion, experience, cases etc.
● Completeness/ to specification, hitting the spec (word count, referencing)
