CCT 224
Group Project
- "Pre Report" |
Summer 2017 |
READ
THIS CAREFULLY
Purpose | The Purpose of this project is to give the students a chance to demonstrate their understanding of the main topics in the course, by applying an understanding of those topics to a real company / enterprise. |
What to do | Working in groups,
you will pick a company or enterprise
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Deliverables | The first part
of the project to be handed in June 6th 2017, should
contain the following:
A description of the company or organization, its history, the principal products or services that it creates, its principal customers, its principal suppliers, the nature of the competitive marketplace it operates in and some of the challenges it is presently facing. In addition, you should identify a small number of the value-adding processes the company is engaged in. Part 1 of the group project
should be just a few pages
The main purpose of Part 1 Pre-Report is to make sure everyone is in a group and has picked a company and is making progress. By giving this a small amount of marks you will take this task seriously. Part 2 will extend Part 1
by providing an analysis of the company and the identification of appropriate
measures in each of the other 3 quadrants of the balanced scorecard. Where
possible your project will be completed with a reconsideration of the challenges
the company or organization is facing, how it should address these challenges
and how it can determine how successful it is in addressing them. This
will involve your identifying appropriate measures of success in each of
the four balanced scorecard quadrants.
Consider the "standards" of excellence expected of a CCIT student at UTM and make sure the "production value" of the document you hand in meets those standards - check tips page |
Considerations for picking the company | The company
you select can be of any size though remember that your ability to get
info from a "big company" is different than if you pick a medium size enterprise
where you might have direct contact.
Your project will require your group to provide an analysis of the company from a broad perspective which you will find described as of ‘balanced scorecard”. Hence, you will need to examine the financial performance of the company over a period of time – this means that the company you select should have been in existence for at least 3 years and preferably 5. You are required to assess the performance of the company from a financial perspective. This will not only involve comparing the performance of the company over time but also its performance relative to similar companies. It is strongly suggested that you provide an analysis of appropriate financial ratios in this section of your project report. With respect to the customer, or market, aspect of the balanced scorecard you will need to first decide what measures of performance would be relevant in this area and provide an explanation as to why they are relevant. Where possible you will also need to provide information about the company’s performance with respect to these measures. You may be limited in the actual information you can collect about the specific company you have chose but you should do your best. To the extent to which you are able to obtain company specific information you should also provide an analysis of this information. If you find it very difficult to get information from the company you will need to do some research and at least be able to suggest some measures which will be useful. Where possible you need to
investigate the company’s specific business processes – this will be one
of the difficult areas for your research – it will be helpful if you select
a company which has a significant presence in Toronto as this will allow
you to at least ask some questions about what information the company collects
about their internal processes. You may, however, have to rely on relatively
limited publicly available information. As before you will need to identify
appropriate characteristics of these processes and discuss how the company
performs with respect to these characteristics (parameters). You may well
find, however, that it is very difficult to get company specific information
in this area. If this is the case then you will be required to provide
a thoughtful and reasoned discussion about what are likely to be the most
important business processes for the company and the relevant parameters
of these processes that would need to be measured.
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Finally, you need to look
into the measurement and management of the human resources of company that
you have selected. The same guidance to that given above is relevant –
if you can get company specific information you should make use of this.
If not you should identify and explain appropriate measures of the learning
and growth aspects of the balanced scorecard for the company.