1. Analyse the international business environment and the development of global organisations.

Indicative content:

Define globalisation and the theories of international trade;

Appraise the benefits and challenges of globalisation strategies and the supporting theories;

Analyse and identify appropriate organisational structures to support globalisation;

2. Identify those actions that determine whether an organisation survives, prospers or dies.

Indicative content:

Examine the effectiveness and efficiency of existing operations;

Examine strategic alternatives available for achieving organisational goals;

Evaluate consolidation and product market development alternatives;

Evaluate direction and the means to achieve unrelated development;

Evaluate the use of strategic alliances and joint ventures, and alternative routes to survive, prosper and avoid failure;

Evaluate the balance of the corporate product market portfolio.

3. Critically analyse given organisations to identify hard and soft system factors that impact upon success and failure in the development and implementation of a business plan

Indicative content:

Within real life organisational case contexts, use and contrast hard and soft systems methodology to analyse the effectiveness of corporate resources and processes:

Analyse the dynamics between strategic, management and operational levels;

Analyse the dynamics of people management and culture;

Analyse the dynamics of access to and processing of information;

Analyse the dynamics of the management of financial resources;

Analyse the dynamics of technology and operations;

Critically appraise the importance of the value chain and value system in adding competitive value;

Understand how resources and competences need to be integrated to enable corporate success;

4. Integrate knowledge and understanding of an organisation’s external business environment, its management and leadership potential and its ability to change and to develop and implement a business strategy, for a given organisation.

Indicative content:

Within real life organisational case contexts:

Analyse the impact on the business strategy of the external business environment;

Analyse the importance of markets and competition in developing and implementing a successful business strategy;

Analyse the importance of customer driven strategies in developing and implementing a successful business strategy;

Analyse the importance of management and leadership in developing and implementing a successful business strategy;

Critically assess the impact of change management in the development and implementation of a successful business strategy;

5. Critically appraise the effect of changes in corporate governance on an organisation.

Indicative content:

Identify the principles of sound corporate governance in an organisation;

Appraise the impact of corporate governance on internal controls in an organisation;

Describe recommendations and regulations on corporate governance within organisations;

Critically analyse the impact of recommendations and regulations of corporate governance on organisations within a global context;

6. Appraise the effect of a move to ethical management on organisations.

Indicative content:

Explain the meaning of ethics in a business context;

Analyse the extent of ethical considerations and their cost;

Identify the responsibility for ethics within an organisation;

Discuss the relationship between ethics and corporate governance;

Critically appraise organisational arrangements for supervising ethical issues, for example ethics committees, audit committees, whistle blowing etc;

7. Monitor implemented strategies and plans

Indicative content:

Identify the elements of the implementation process – objectives, plans, resource allocation, monitoring and control;

In a real life organisational context:

i) Identify appropriate control mechanisms to monitor strategies and plans

ii) Evaluate the use of alternative communication mechanisms for strategic implementation

iii) Appraise the use of control systems and targets, for example scorecard, financial measures, budgets, to monitor strategies and plans

iv) Evaluate market based review mechanisms, for example customer satisfaction, quality measures, market share

Analyse the benefits and challenges of the use of target setting to monitor strategies and plans within both public and private sector organisations;