Course Title: Strategic Analysis and Decision Making

Part A: Course Overview

Course Title: Strategic Analysis and Decision Making

Credit Points: 12.00

Terms

Course Code	Campus	Career	School	Learning Mode	Teaching Period(s)
BUSM1488	City Campus	Undergraduate	630H Management	Face-to-Face	Sem 1 2006, Sem 2 2006

Course Coordinator: John Odgers

Course Coordinator Phone: +61 3 55505

Course Coordinator Email: John.Odgers@rmit.edu.au

Pre-requisite Courses and Assumed Knowledge and Capabilities

AC114 and AC406 or AC103; EF122 or LM479; MK100
You are also assumed to have fully completed the equivalent of first two thirds of your program.

Course Description

The course focuses on the responsibilities of those managers charged with strategically managing an organization, or part thereof.
This course introduces you to the field of strategic analysis and decision making at the organisation-wide level. It builds on many of the theories, concepts, and an analytical technique introduced in other courses, and encourages you to apply the knowledge and skills and analytical techniques that you have developed to date.
The course also offers you new learning especially in respect of the relevance and use of comprehensive analytical models to help solve complex, ill-structured organisational problems and to strategically position an organization to effectively and efficiently pursue environmental opportunities. The course improves your business research skills through applied research activities. The course and its learning outcomes also directly contribute to its your social and civic capabilities through its stress on organisational ethics, corporate social responsibility and sustainable corporate development.

Objectives/Learning Outcomes/Capability Development

This course contributes to the development of the following capabilities
1. High level ability to gather and / or absorb and synthesize large amounts of data
2. introductory level ability to strategically analyze;
3. medium level ability for critical thinking;
4. introductory level ability for handling ambiguity;
5. medium level ability for evaluating, priotizing and deciding;
6. high level ability to communicate professionally;
7. high level of ability to work collaboratively in teams;
8. high level of ability to manage time;
9. high level of independent learning skills.
At the completion of this course you will be able to:
1. recognise the strategic implications of key external environmental characteristics, identify the major opportunities and threats embedded within specific external environments, and propose the critical success factors for each of a specific external environments market segments;
2. strategically analyse specific organizations’ internal environments by applying a nine step evaluative model. .
3. identify and justify strategic issues facing organizations based on a strategic analysis of their external and internal environments.
4. specify and evaluate strategic options for each strategic issue that your analysis has identified.
5. make recommendations to a specific organization, selected from your evaluated options that you will be able to demonstrably help the organization to resolve the strategic issues you have identified and justified.
6. professionally and convincingly communicate the results of your strategic analysis and decision making to senior level executives and / or to shareholders.
7. purposefully access a range of widely available business research resources to objectively explore and analyse specific strategic management topics.
8. work cooperatively and professionally within small, task specific study groups.
9. make strategic decisions and to implement and control them in a simulated business environment.

Overview of Learning Activities

Your learning in this course will involve your active involvement in the following types of activities
• Personal use of strategic analysis model and related work sheets in analysing published strategic management case studies.
• Your attendance at and active engagement in scheduled ‘instructor led’ lectures and / or seminars.
• Active, regular and constructive participation in team based assignment.
• Preparation and submission of written assignments.
• Learning how to schedule, manage and deliver against assigned deadlines.
• Active and productive use of time in accessing and analysing available/ published knowledge and business information sources

Overview of Learning Resources

The course uses prescribed text(s), but you are strongly encouraged to use a variety of other reference sources.
The DLS will be used to provide a printable copy of all slides presented in the course’s lectures and / or seminars. It will also be used to provide detailed instructions about the course’s assignment tasks and to communicate important course announcements.

Overview of Assessment

You will be assessed both on your individual assignment and/or examination performance, and on your contribution to group assignments.
Assessment of your submitted work will be based on assessing your level of achievement of the course’s learning outcomes relevant to the specific assessment task being undertaken.