Westminster International College

Module Title: Strategic Management

Programme: MBA
Semester: One
Lecturer: Dr. Rashad Yazdanifard
Date of Completion and Submission: 16th June 2016
Submission Method: Turnitin
Assessment Type: Individual Written Assignment

Table of Contents:
1. Assessment type
2. Maximum word limit and assessment weighting for each aspect within the
assessment
3. Description of assessment requirements
4. Learning Outcomes
5. Summary of marking scheme
6. Grading Criteria
7. Notes on Plagiarism & Harvard Referencing

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SECTION 1
Assessment Type:

Individual report (100%)

SECTION 2
Maximum Word Limit and Assessment weighting for each aspect within the assessment:

Individual Report: 4000 words

SECTION 3
Description of Assessment Requirements
Business failure elicit various reactions, while research in this domain often appears to be limited
by a lack of access to information about failure and by the negativity that surrounds it. Those
who have experienced failure do not readily talk about it, or they disappear from the radar screen
of researchers. Yet failure is preceded by decline which, when focused on strategically, can
reduce eventual failures if early action is taken.
Decline has three core drivers, three peripheral drivers and four moderators. The core
drivers identified are: resource munificence; leadership as origin; and causality (strategic versus
operational origin of decline).
The three peripheral drivers are: unique preconditions; continuous decisions impact; and
extremes dichotomy.
Four moderators of the drivers: life cycle stage; stakeholder perspective; quantitative versus
qualitative nature of signs and causes; and finally the age and size effects.
Strategists need to understand what drives decline in order to act timeously; practitioners who
have an insight into the moderators with their impacts could make better decisions in response to
decline in organisations and possibly avoid business failure. Understanding business decline is
still a huge theoretical challenge, which drives turnaround strategies chosen by management.
As a strategy consultant, you have been approached by the Board of Directors of a company to
advise them on their future strategic direction. You are required to present your opinion, based
upon research evidence above, in the form of a report to cover the following tasks:

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Task 1 (25 marks) 1000 Words

Based on the core drivers of failure, discuss possible strategies that the company could follow to
defend its core business. Analyze and evaluate specifically the resource implications of your
recommendations that the company has to address.
Task 2 (25 marks) 1000 Words
Identify the strategic options the company should embark upon in view of its peripheral factors
in which the company is currently facing.
Task 3 (25 marks) 1000 Words
How can the understanding of the four moderators enable the company to realign itself toward a
positive feedback mechanism and improve strategy making to cope with the decline of global
economic conditions?
Task 4 (25 marks) 1000 Words
In the light of your discussion in tasks 1-3 analyze, evaluate and propose a strategic framework
that the company should embark upon to shield itself from future decline and failures keeping
the company resilient and sustainable
(Total: 100 marks) 4000 Words
You may use appendices. These do not affect the word count.

SECTION 4 : Learning Outcomes

Learning outcomes tested:
Task 1
Critically analyse a case situation in terms of strategic issues and make justified
recommendations
Task 2
Demonstrate, understand and critically explain the importance of integrational
thinking in their understanding of strategy and its formation and development in
complex organisations

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Task 3
Evaluate and develop the ability to identify strategic issues and design appropriate
courses of action
Identify and explain the importance of how the synthesise of knowledge gained from
other business modules may be brought together into a comprehensive
understanding of the concepts underpinning competitive advantage.
Task 4
Understand and be able to critically analyse the strategic position and the
interrelated functions of Production and Operations Management (POM) in
organisations

Section 5: Marking Scheme

Task 1
Understand the core drivers of failure and its impact toward the corporate organization i.e
resource availability and allocation
(25 marks)
Task 2
The assessment and impact of peripheral factors towards identifying strategic options (Use of
relevant models and concepts when exploring the above factors)
(25 marks)
Task 3
Moderators as enablers for realignment. Use of relevant tools to draw appropriate conclusions.
(25
marks)
Task 4
Exploration an appropriate framework for corporate resilience and sustainability (i,e strategic
choice models to sustain company's competitive position)
(25 marks)
Total (100 marks)

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SECTION 7: Notes on Plagiarism & Harvard Referencing

General Guidelines

The submission of your work assessment should be organized and clearly

structured in a report format.

Maximum word length allowed is 4000 words, excluding words in charts &
tables and in the appendixes section of your assignment.

This assignment is worth 100% of the final assessment of the module.

Student is required to submit a type-written document in Microsoft Word

format with Times New Roman font type, size 12 and line spacing 1.5.

Indicate the sources of information and literature review by including all the
necessary citations and references adopting the Harvard Referencing System.

Students who have been found to have committed acts of Plagiarism are
automatically considered to have failed the entire semester. If found to
have breached the regulation for the second time, you will be asked to
leave the course.

Plagiarism involves taking someone elses words, thoughts, ideas or essays

from online essay banks and trying to pass them off as your own. It is a form
of cheating which is taken very seriously.

Notes on Plagiarism & Harvard Referencing

Plagiarism
Plagiarism is passing off the work of others as your own. This constitutes academic theft and is a
serious matter which is penalized in assignment marking.
Plagiarism is the submission of an item of assessment containing elements of work produced by
another person(s) in such a way that it could be assumed to be the students own work. Examples
of plagiarism are:

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the verbatim copying of another persons work without acknowledgement

the close paraphrasing of another persons work by simply changing a few

words or altering the order of presentation without acknowledgement

the unacknowledged quotation of phrases from another persons work and/or
the presentation of another persons idea(s) as ones own.

Copying or close paraphrasing with occasional acknowledgement of the source may also be
deemed to be plagiarism is the absence of quotation marks implies that the phraseology is the
students own.
Plagiarised work may belong to another student or be from a published source such as a book,
report, journal or material available on the internet.
Harvard Referencing
The structure of a citation under the Harvard referencing system is the authors surname, year of
publication, and page number or range, in parentheses, as illustrated in the Smith example near
the top of this article.

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The page number or page range is omitted if the entire work is cited. The
authors surname is omitted if it appears in the text. Thus we may say : Jones
(2001) revolutionized the field of trauma surgery.

Two or three authors are cited using and or & : (Deane, Smith, and Jones,
1991) or (Deane, Smith & Jones, 1991). More than three authors are cited using
et al. (Deane et al. 1992).

An unknown date is cited as no date (Deane n.d.). A reference to a reprint is

cited with the original publication date in square brackets (Marx [1867] 1967, p.
90).

If an author published two books in 2005, the year of the first (in the alphabetic
order of the references) is cited and referenced as 2005a, the second as 2005b.

A citation is placed wherever appropriate in or after the sentence. If it is at the

end of a sentence, it is placed before the period, but a citation for an entire
block quote immediately follows the period at the end of the block since the
citation is not an actual part of the quotation itself.

Complete citations are provided in alphabetical order in a section following the

text, usually designated as Works cited or References. The difference
between a works cited or references list and a bibliography is that a
bibliography may include works not directly cited in the text.

All citations are in the same font as the main text.

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Examples
Examples of book references are :

Smith, J. (2005a). Dutch Citing Practices. The Hague: Holland Research

Foundation.

Smith, J. (2005b). Harvard Referencing. London: Jolly Good Publishing.

In giving the city of publication, an internationally well-known city (such as London, The Hague,
or New York) is referenced as the city alone. If the city is not internationally well known, the
country (or state and country if in the U.S.) are given.
An example of a journal reference :

Smith, John Maynard. The origin of altruism, Nature 393, 1998, pp. 63940.

An example of a journal reference :

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Bowcott, Owen. Street Protest, The Guardian, October 18, 2005, accessed
February 7, 2006.