CCT 224 Group Project 2011
 
 
 
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.
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What to do Working in groups, you will pick a company or enterprise (one which has not been done before by your group or any other group) and discuss how the company's performance has been in the context of topics such as
  • Balanced Scorecard
  • influences of the Competitive Environment
  • relevant Financial Ratios that describe their performance
  • Human Capital and performance
  • global international business influences
  • business processes, such as BPR and TQM and JIT


preceeding this analysis it would make sense to identify, or conjecture, the company's Goal and Objectives so that this analysis can be put into context
 
 
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Deliverables The first part of the project to be handed in 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 between 7-9 pages, or so.

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.

The complete project (Part 1 and Part 2) should be approximately 20 pages long.

consider the "standards" of excellence expected of a CCIT student at UTM and make sure the "production value" of the document youhand in meets those standards - check tips page
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The company you select can be of any size though remember if you select a large company you should probably check with me first so that we can explore whether it would be a good idea to focus your project.

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.

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.