MBA FPX 5006 Assessment 1 Strategic Process and Analysis
Executive Summary
In Prominent organizations and IT companies prioritize enhancing processes and conducting strategic environmental assessments to improve their decision-making. This company aspires to establish itself as a leading software firm in the United States and is experiencing rapid growth. To achieve this, there is a pressing need to refine and enhance the company’s business model. Consequently, this report holds paramount importance, as it aims to empower managerial decision-making using various environmental analysis frameworks. These frameworks, including VRIO, PESTLE analysis, and SWOT analysis, serve as valuable tools for determining the optimal path forward for the company’s leadership (Malhotra, 2021).
Environmental Analysis of the Organization
Professionals in strategic analysis are pivotal in crafting impartial reports encompassing internal and external assessments of their organizations. To scrutinize the organizational landscape, these experts employ diverse frameworks, including X or Value Chain Analysis, SWOT analysis, and PESTEL analysis, as outlined by Kreutzer (2019). The significance of this report, rooted in the company’s analysis, cannot be overstated. It is a critical resource for managers and high-level decision-makers seeking to enhance their strategic planning processes.
The Importance of AFI Framework in Strategic Planning
Analysis
The AFI framework finds extensive utility within numerous organizations as a linchpin for enhancing strategic management and overall performance. AFI, an acronym denoting Analyze, Formulate, and Implement, as explained by Karar et al. (2021), encapsulates the core imperatives for effective management within this American tech company, Vengile Soft, as it navigates the challenges of competitive landscapes.
For instance, formulation’s first pivotal phase empowers managers and top executives to decipher their strategy. It aids in discerning how and where they can judiciously deploy it to secure a sustainable competitive edge. Furthermore, an equally critical facet of this framework is the implementation stage, where managers discern the most productive approaches for the organization. This phase involves crafting well-considered plans and strategies to enhance operational outcomes.
Implementation and Benefits
Beyond these fundamental functions, the AFI model provides organizational leaders a roadmap to define their values, visions, and missions. Within the company’s long-term vision lies the aspiration to bolster goodwill and establish a distinctive value proposition for a global clientele in software. After crystallizing a transparent and concise vision, leaders can forge a unified mission for the organization. At Vengile, this mission entails articulating the company’s products and services, catering to an international customer base.
The company’s mission is underpinned by a commitment to delivering cutting-edge, high-quality software products, tools, and websites. This underscored commitment reflects how the AFI framework aids in advancing long-term strategic planning. Its potential to elevate the organization’s status to a premier brand in the United States is manifest.
The Role of Leadership in Strategic Planning
This American software company’s effectiveness hinges significantly on its leadership’s capabilities. Leadership development is an ongoing process that takes diverse forms, commencing with the company’s executives and General Managers who engage in strategic planning and one-on-one coaching for employees. Within the organization, the primary aim of strategic leadership is to orchestrate strategic planning, incorporating a competency model tailored to the organization’s specific requirements. To achieve this, leaders must address fundamental questions, such as the company’s annual objectives and envisioned progress over the next three to five years.
Furthermore, ethical leadership is intrinsic to acting ethically within the organization, setting a precedent for ethical conduct, and inspiring employees to adhere to ethical standards, codes, and principles. Ethical leaders excel in motivating others to do what is right and helping them define the type of employees they ought to be, including establishing clear ethical boundaries and codes within the organization. VRIO, which stands for Value, Rareness, and Imitability, plays a pivotal role in effecting the necessary changes to augment the value provided to global software customers and clients, as Messineo (2023) highlighted. This involves enhancing software coding and website development systems and expanding marketing strategies to attract new clients beyond Europe and the US. Additionally, imitability enables the company to establish a presence in numerous offices outside of America, bolstering its position as a dominant software programming entity.
MBA FPX 5006 Assessment 1 Strategic Process and Analysis
Developing a strategic leadership plan is a compass for Vengile’s managers to steer the company toward future growth, as emphasized by Kreutzer (2019). This entails devising a growth plan that may commence with short-term objectives, but a comprehensive leadership plan necessitates actionable steps to attain those specific goals. Given the current need for transformation amid endemic challenges and global economic crises, a leadership strategic plan is indispensable to ensure the company is heading in the right direction.
To this end, the transformational leadership theory becomes instrumental, facilitating collaboration among leaders to formulate and determine future objectives. Subsequently, leaders brainstorm sessions to create detailed, incremental steps that foster continuous progress.
Analysis of the Internal Environments
PESTEL
The organization’s resources encompass financial assets, asset ownership, patents, and goodwill. Additionally, the company relies on its human resources, collaborating with management and supervisors to attain leadership objectives. These internal resources have been invaluable. However, their future utility is uncertain due to intense competition within the US software development sector and the company’s workforce training, retention, and management approaches, as Nirwana et al. (2023) illustrated.
The company’s internal environment includes diverse components, such as male and female employees, digital machinery, and marketers, all contributing to management’s pursuit of competitive advantage. Hence, the internal environment comprises resources that the organization can directly employ and control. This underscores the interrelation between the organization’s strategies and its governance structure. The company strongly emphasizes IT governance, which provides a framework for aligning its IT strategies with broader business objectives. It follows a formal model to yield quantifiable outcomes.
External Environmental Analysis
The role of PESTEL analysis is pivotal in evaluating the company’s position and its external environment, comprising various factors.
Political
Influence from the political arena extends to government policies and their level of involvement in the economy, as indicated by Nirwana et al. (2023). This encompasses matters like IT regulations, software export guidelines, and priorities in terms of business support. Political decisions can impact a company’s choices, affecting employee training, healthcare benefits, and infrastructure quality.
Economic
Economic factors encompass interest rates, tax policies, the country’s economic development, and inflationary pressures. Government spending and unemployment rates also influence Vengile Soft’s future policy planning.
Social
Social factors delve into cultural dimensions, including a country’s population growth and demographic characteristics, such as gender, race, age, career aspirations, lifestyle preferences, safety considerations, and objectives, as highlighted by Kreutzer (2019). For instance, immigration regulations and diversity issues necessitate equitable policies to cater to people’s needs and balance work and leisure activities.
Technological
Technological factors encompass environmental and ecological aspects, which impact barriers to entry in the software industry, minimum production efficiency, and the company’s outsourcing decisions. Additionally, they include considerations such as R&D activity and the level of automation.
Legal
Legal factors encapsulate the country’s legal environment, where recent legal changes can influence managerial behavior. For example, age discrimination and disability regulations prevent discriminatory practices within the organization, while adhering to legislated minimum wage increases is imperative, as articulated by Gostin et al. (2019).
Environmental
Environmental factors encompass elements related to climate change and regional weather patterns. Environmental shifts, driven by issues like global warming, necessitate heightened ecological awareness among managers to navigate this external factor effectively.
Porter Five Forces Model
Porter’s Five Forces serves as a valuable business model that aids the chosen company in shaping its management strategy to boost revenue. This comprehensive tool provides insights into the IT industry, offering a profound understanding of its structural dynamics and growth drivers, as Scott (2023) illuminated.
Influence of Buyers
The IT industry in the US boasts a substantial number of buyers, with remarkable growth, as Nirwana et al. (2023) noted, reaching nearly $5 trillion in 2021, indicating a 4.2% increase over the past year. This underscores the potential for the company to harness digital transformation and prosper.
Suppliers
Vengile Soft engages with over 200 suppliers annually, conducting market analyses and soliciting proposals to inform their business decisions.
New Entrants Threat
Economies of scale play a crucial role in assessing the threat of new entrants. The company can attain economies of scale by reducing costs and increasing production, bolstering its competitive position.
Substitutes Threat
Given the abundance of substitutes in the software market, Vengile must prioritize cost efficiency to mitigate the allure of alternatives. A profound understanding of the limitations associated with these substitutes is vital.
Existing Customers
In the US market, market shares are evenly distributed among numerous competitors. Vengile Soft must remain cost-competitive to maintain a competitive edge, as high costs can jeopardize its market standing.
Recommendations for Leaders
At Vengile, the primary objective of its leaders is the transformation and efficient management of business operations, achieved through enhanced utilization of technology and infrastructure. The company recognizes the imperative for improvement, spanning strategy, design, and operational aspects. In response to clients’ rapidly evolving and innovative requirements and the pressing concern of data security, Vengile is poised to migrate its data storage to cloud servers in 2023, as outlined by Zeng et al. (2022).
Amid economic challenges, including recessions, certain IT firms can thrive by astutely addressing external challenges and cutting costs associated with underperforming equipment. This strategic approach not only enhances outputs but also fosters financial savings.
A pivotal strategy entails curtailing staffing expenses and recruitment costs, albeit with careful consideration to ensure that invaluable team members with specialized knowledge are retained. A reasonable reduction in sourcing, hiring, and training investments and a balanced workload distribution can significantly enhance employee productivity.
Furthermore, the Servant Leadership Theory application emerges as a linchpin during challenging times, fostering effective, compassionate, empathetic, resilient, organized, and caring supervisory practices aligned with the principles Albuquerque and others expounded in 2020. This strategic approach is the cornerstone of effective leadership within the IT department, enabling team members to realize their full potential, operate with motivation, and sustain long-term productivity.
Conclusion
In conclusion, this report’s primary objective is to comprehensively examine the internal and external landscapes surrounding Vengile IT, a software company in the United States. The organization seeks to cultivate a fresh leadership perspective to steer its ambitions toward sustainable revenue growth in light of global economic challenges. The PESTEL analysis highlights that the company’s strategic direction should involve recruiting Servant Leadership experts. These professionals are essential for fostering team cohesion and motivation, especially in adverse economic conditions.
References
Gostin, L. O., Monahan, J. T., Kaldor, J., DeBartolo, M., Friedman, E. A., Gottschalk, K., Kim, S. C., Alwan, A., Binagwaho, A., Burci, G. L., Cabal, L., DeLand, K., Evans, T. G., Goosby, E., Hossain, S., Koh, H., Ooms, G., Roses Periago, M., Uprimny, R., & Yamin, A. E. (2019). The legal determinants of health: Harnessing the power of law for global health and sustainable development. The Lancet, 393(10183), 1857–1910.
https://doi.org/10.1016/s0140-6736(19)30233-8
Karar, A. N., Labib, A., & Jones, D. F. (2021). A conceptual framework for an agile asset performance management process. Journal of Quality in Maintenance Engineering, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print).
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Kreutzer, R. T. (2019). Tools for the strategic analysis. Management for Professionals, 89–142.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13823-3_4
Malhotra, A. (2021). Does environmental analysis improves managerial decision-making? Annals of Social Sciences & Management Studies, 6(2).
https://doi.org/10.19080/asm.2021.06.555684
Messineo, R. (2023, April 14). Explaining The VRIO Framework (With A Real-Life Example). Www.clearpointstrategy.com.
https://www.clearpointstrategy.com/blog/vrio-framework
Nirwana, Haliah, & Lukman, A. (2023). Role of human resources management for corporate sustainbility. OIKONOMIA Journal of Economics and Management Science, 1(2), 37–42.
https://doi.org/10.59165/oikonomia.v1i2.15
Scott, G. (2023, June 19). Porter’s 5 Forces Explained and How to Use the Model. Investopedia.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/porter.asp
Zeng, F., Zhang, K., Wu, L., & Wu, J. (2022). Efficient caching in vehicular edge computing based on edge-cloud collaboration. IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, 1–14.
https://doi.org/10.1109/tvt.2022.3213130
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