 Hi everybody and welcome back. This session is going to be focused on going over the first practice case study for strategic management. I'm Dr. Laura Portales and thank you for having watched the other videos that were posted previously and if you haven't had a chance to review those, you should go back and review those before you come back and and review this video. So I do want to say congratulations because at this point by the time you're watching this video you are pretty much complete with all of the content in the course. Now you'll just focus on the case study and the questions. So the purpose of this session will be to go over the correct answers for case study number one and I also want to give you a couple of tips and things that you may think about as you work through these these case studies both for practice and for the real one that you'll be taking probably fairly soon. A couple of things to think about the way I approach case study and and test questions like this is first I would suggest reading through the entire case study maybe even a couple of times to make sure you understand the situation and what is going on and then I suggest that you go through and you read every single question and before you answer anything. So go through the whole all of the questions read through them and then go back and look at the and first answer the questions that you're really comfortable with that you know for sure that you have the correct answer. So that allows you to then go back and look at the ones maybe that you're not quite sure about. So again read through the case a couple of times and next you'll want to go through read all of the questions go back answer the ones that you're really really comfortable with and you're sure that you know the answer and then go back and address the ones maybe that you aren't sure about. So that would be my recommendation on on how to approach this. So let's talk a little bit about this case. We have a situation where these two friends have started this really successful side business and they're pretty excited because they've started actually earning more money in the side business than than they do in their regular jobs. So they're really thinking that they may need to look at a strategic direction for for their side business and so they they are digging in and they're developing a mission and a vision and then they also do that internal analysis a SWOT analysis on their company and then they next of course will do a pest or pestal analysis and then move forward with developing the goals and objectives for their business. So let's dig into the questions here and talk about the correct answers and why the answers are are correct. So in this first question it talks about implementation of their strategic plan and what short term specific things do they need to do to implement the strategy. The key words in this question are short term and specific. So because of that the correct answer is tactics. As you know mission is an overarching overarching long term goals tend to be more overarching and also long term objectives are a bit shorter term but the specific things these are the day to day things the week to week things that someone would do in order to to meet the the goals and objectives of their strategic plan. So for this one our correct answer is D tactics. So let's look at our second question. We know that they have not yet performed a pestal analysis and in doing that they're going to look at economic and social aspects that will help guide their strategic direction. So this question is asking what element of the strategic planning process this type of analysis be considered. The correct answer here is B external analysis and the reason for that is an internal analysis of course would be a SWAT analysis not pestal and pestal always looks at the external things within an organization. So you know things like that are listed here economic, social, political that type of thing. So let's move on to question three. Question three asks about the fact that they stay within the price range of their competitors and their differentiation is difficult to do as compared to competitors. So we're looking at what type of market structure they're operating in. The correct answer here is A the monopolistic competition and one thing I want to point out that you may remember when we talked about this some time ago in an earlier video is that a lot of times people will get monopoly confused with monopolistic competition but they're really quite different and the characteristics of monopolistic competition are what is listed here. Differentation is difficult to do and they stay within the price range of their competitors. So those are our two clues that A is the correct answer here. Our next question asks about the delta model and the delta model if you remember is a way of looking at your competitive advantages and in this case the key words here that you'd want to look for is that we're talking about a large horizontal breadth and complete integration of services. So if you're a member from your reading with the delta model when we look at complete integration of services we're really quite focused on providing the best service to our customers. So the correct answer here would be D the total customer solutions. Question number five looks at the sources of competitive advantage and one that you may remember from your readings is TQM or total quality management and there are quite a few costs associated with total quality management and the key here is one thought they have is to review each other's coding before it goes to the client for testing. So when we look at total quality management costs because you're doing the review before it's actually being sent to the client this would be considered a prevention cost for total quality management. For our next question we talked a lot about the value chain as I'm sure you remember and that is one way to achieve a competitive advantage over a pressure competition. So question number six looks at what element of the key study of micro tech value chain would be considered a support activity and a support activity here is A the infrastructure because operation sales and service would not be considered support activities. So infrastructure would be things like the organizational structure and the way that is designed for for their company even though it's quite small. Question number seven looks at the life cycle model and we talk here about them being in the growth phase of the life cycle model and this is because they're a relatively new startup as you know we read that in the case. So the question is asking what kind of challenges or issues might they experience when they're in this growth phase and the correct answer here is A trying to expand their market share because if you remember when we talked about the the life cycle model we talked about how different strategies might be implemented depending on which phase of the life cycle model an organization is at and here definitely the the biggest thing would be market share they're probably not trying to solve technical issues they're probably not ready to introduce new products or services and they're also not looking at finding investments they're really focused in that growth phase of expanding their market share. Question number eight looks at quarter's five forces and the main things to pull out of this question here to get the correct answer is with the five forces what what is the intent of understanding the attractiveness of an industry. So when they do that they determine there are many companies that fulfill the same need and they're also a bit concerned by this because they know that this is important information for them to ultimately determine what their strategy is going to be. So in this case in question number eight the answer is D they're mostly concerned then about substitutes and substitutes again the key here is that many companies fulfill the same need so the correct answer there is D. Question number nine is focused on the generic strategies that we talked about in the course and they're going to focus on differentiation focus. So when a company decides to choose this type of strategy there are two elements because they decided to go this direction that that we should consider here and that is the fact that the market is niche so it's a fairly small market and they're also going to focus on a differentiated product so trying to make at least in the eyes of the customer their product appear really different than their competitors. Our final question for this case study is about a growth platform and if you recall we talked about growth and a variety of different growth strategies that a company might implement and when a company decides to choose growth they're really focusing on A. So the correct answer here is A. The diversification of the services that they offer. So in this case for this company they may focus on hiring someone to do additional types of services maybe that they aren't able to do. So that is all of the questions and answers for this first case study in the next video we'll be addressing the second case study and the questions and answers for that. My recommendation if you missed some of the questions that's okay you do have the course learning outcomes and the unit learning outcomes listed for each of the questions. I would suggest going back to any that you may have missed and going back through and reading the information from that particular unit just to make sure that you have a complete review of it before you do your next case study. So that is it for now as always if you have questions or comments please go ahead and put them in the chat box and thank you so much for joining me and we'll see you at the next case study review. Thank you. I have great news for you. First of all great news for me great news for the audience. I get to come back even though we're not doing these lives to ask you a question. Okay. And the question we had which wasn't from the chat because again we're doing this live but we uh but I was wondering if you could maybe touch a little bit on how each of the questions like relates to the learning outcomes that we discussed like earlier in the course because it's it's noted at the bottom but I I think we'll probably get some questions anyway so we might as well just do it now bonus part of this video just kind of touch real quick on like you know how these learning objectives that we've been telling people to keep track of throughout the course kind of connect back to this case study and then I'll I'm gonna go away again everybody. You don't have to go away Mike. I'd love to. So as you recall during the the first set of videos when we talked about the five units we always talked about the course learning outcomes and how those ultimately map to the unit outcomes so this takes it a step further and allows us to see a particular concept that is in the question and how that maps to the particular unit so what it does is it allows us to measure your comfort level with that particular material so suppose that you got 10 or sorry eight out of 10 of these correct you probably would want to go back at the two that you didn't get correct review the what the unit learning outcome is and then go back and look at that and reread that content. Does that answer the question Mike? Yes I think so I think it's I yeah I just want to make sure that people know like remember the learning objectives are important and in this course if you just went over right now there is a direct correlation between each one of these parts of the case study and a specific learning objective that you guys hopefully have through the course and through the great videos that that Laura's been doing for us you that you've gotten down and if you're if you're missing something go back and check those but that's that just me interjecting is not a subject. I think that's great I think that's a great great point that you know everything does tie together in these courses and everything ultimately is mapped to the course learning outcomes everything from each bit of content that that is in the course as well as of course these these questions as well. Alright absolutely well I guess since I'm back anyway I might as well just say thanks again everyone for joining us if you have any questions leave them in the comments in the chat of course we have lists to the previous videos that were live streamed in this course and you can find a link to the course itself but we will be back next week for you guys but just mere moments for ourselves so thank you everyone and good luck on the course and again thank you Dr. Laura for taking us through this. Thank you bye everybody.