COMM1180 1 COMM1180 T1 2022 Assessment #2 Term Project Date: Feb 14, 2022 Introduction Purpose In COMM1180, you are learning about a number of frameworks that attempt to identify, measure or even create value: Porter’s value chain, Porter’s Generic Strategies, the Value Proposition Canvas and modern multi-stakeholder frameworks such as “Creating Shared Value” and “Grow the Pie”. This term-long project will allow you to apply several of these frameworks to a real company case. Thus, you will need to draw on the knowledge you acquire during lectures and the skills you practice during the tutorials, especially those of the first 3 weeks. You will also be asked to analyse ethical dilemmas around corporate decision making and critically review corporate actions. An additional learning outcome is for teams to learn to collaborate effectively, incorporate different perspectives, produce quality work according to an agreed plan, and provide constructive feedback to each other. Setting the scene You have been hired as part of a management consulting team by to provide an outside opinion on several value-relevant aspects of the company’s activities. The management of the company is keen to raise its public profile and be recognised for being a good corporate citizen. To this end, they have set their eyes on an award for “Creating Shared Value”1. Your consulting report will help management to understand their strengths and the challenges they are facing as they are getting ready to apply for this award. You will find a lot of company specific information that is relevant to the questions below in the annual report of your chosen company (available on Moodle). Feel free to use the company’s website or other credible sources of information to support your arguments. For example, you might consult related information from a supplier or use product reviews to inform yourself about the product market. If you do use additional sources, you should highlight the source of the information with a footnote that describes that source and/or contains an URL. 1 These awards do exist. For an example, see http://sharedvalue.org.au/awards/application-form/apply- organisational-award/ COMM1180 2 You can choose one from the following well-known Australian companies: Bega Cheese Annual Report – https://www.begacheese.com.au/investors/annual-reports/ Sustainability – https://www.begacheese.com.au/sustainability/ Ansell Annual report – https://www.ansell.com/au/en/about-us/investor-center/annual-and-financial- reports Sustainability – https://www.ansell.com/au/en/about-us/sustainability Timeline In stage 1 of the project, each student will pick one company and submit a short written, individual report. Note that there are several submission steps involved. Students are required to: 1) submit a draft of their report to Smarthinking (UNSW’s free online writing support service) by Wednesday Week 4 at the latest 2) upload the feedback provided by Smarthinking by Friday of Week 4 3) incorporate Smarthinking feedback into your final individual report and make the final submission by Friday of Week 5 The first 2 steps of the assessment is formative in that the quality of your draft does not affect your mark. The purpose of the task is to provide feedback on your writing that you can apply to your final drafts. You are required to upload your Smarthinking feedback in time to gain access to the submission link for the final written report. The turn-around time of Smarthinking is quite fast (24-48 hours). However, this still means that you must submit your draft to Smarthinking at least 2 days before the first deadline to assure timely receipt of feedback. Students should aim to have a well- developed draft at this point to maximize the usefulness of the feedback. Students then have until the second deadline to incorporate this feedback. You can find more details about using Smarthinking for this assignment on the Moodle course page. In stage 2, students will form consulting teams to combine their perspectives and skill sets to work on a detailed and critical analysis of several value-related activities of this company. Students choosing the same company in stage 1 will form groups. This stage will start after the submission of the individual report and run until the final submission at the end of week 10. Assessment part Due date (11:59 PM) Weight Deliverable Smarthinking submission 1-2 days before first deadline n/a Draft of milestone Feedback upload Friday of Week 4 n/a Smarthinking feedback Milestone submission Friday of Week 5 10% Short individual report COMM1180 3 Final submission Friday of Week 10 20% Final team consulting report Stage 1 – Individual Milestone Fact-finding report Take a look at the company’s annual report. You can ignore the financial statements in the back. Near the front, you might notice that, unlike U.S. based companies, Australian companies report a lot of non-financial information, e.g., the ‘shared value’ they create for their various stakeholders. Many also use ‘integrated reporting’ – something you will learn much more about towards the end of this course – to elaborate on how they have grown along the six dimensions of capital (not just financial capital) over the reporting period. Individual Task In preparation for the final report described later on, you are tasked with writing a short report on ONE non-financial stakeholder of the company (not shareholders or creditors!). The purpose of this report is to provide your team members with an understanding of the key issues that affect this particular stakeholder-company relationship. 1) Stakeholder description: Define and describe this stakeholder clearly. The stakeholder should be specific and not generic, e.g., pick one supplier or a well-defined group of suppliers of a particular item that the company uses; customers of a particular product or service; a particular aspect of a community or the environment. 2) Stakeholder relationship with the company: Identify and describe relevant ways in which this stakeholder interacts with the company, how they affect the company and how the actions of the company affect them. Think beyond the purely transactional here: What forms of value does the stakeholder receive from the company (this could be positive or negative e.g., in the case of pollution) and vice versa 3) Use the value chain framework to identify and discuss at least one critical primary activity and at least one critical support activity that will enable the company to create the value or reduce the harmful effects for your stakeholder identified in (2). Submission format A preliminary report covering the 3 items above plus introduction and summary sections using the template provided. Length: No more than 700 words. Must be 1.5 line spaced, 2.5 cm left aligned margin, 12-point font (Times New Roman or Arial) and the footer must have ZID and page numbers. All materials used in this report must be referenced in Harvard format. Any assessment submitted without a reference list will not be marked. For details and assistance on Harvard referencing, see https://student.unsw.edu.au/harvard-referencing COMM1180 4 o Please note that Wikipedia is not an appropriate source for academic work as it is not reliable. Any use of Wikipedia as a reference will result in an automatic zero mark for the assessment. You must first submit a draft to Smarthinking and then upload the feedback from Smarthinking by end of Friday of Week 4. This will earn you access to the submission link of the finalized report. Not doing this will mean that your report may not be marked, and you have a risk of receiving ZERO in this assignment. Submit the finalized report by end of Friday of Week 5. All submissions via their respective links under ‘Assessments’ on the Moodle course page. Part 2: Team Component Final consulting report Following the preliminary step of identifying individual stakeholders, you and your team are now ready to tackle the big areas of concern in the eyes of management as they are on their quest to be recognised as an organisation that creates “Shared Value”. Your team’s job is to deliver a consulting report to management on how well the company is tracking along the following dimensions: 1. How well do the company’s words and actions align 2. How well does the company serve its customers’ needs 3. How severe are the conflicts amongst its stakeholders and the trade-offs faced by management 4. Is there room for improvement, i.e., the potential for creating additional shared value Your team leader has analysed these questions and broken them up into many smaller questions and tasks for you and your teammates as follows: I. Mission Statement and Business Purpose In order to address the first question, locate the company’s mission statement or statement of purpose. It may not be explicitly stated as such, but typically the annual report will contain the relevant language in a prominent spot. Can you extract “the why,” i.e., why does the company exist 2 Which stakeholders are central to its purpose Could the same language be applied to a firm in a completely different industry Does the annual report (or the company’s website) contain enough evidence that these words correspond to some concrete actions Thus, render a judgement as to the specificity and authenticity of the company’s language around its purpose. II. Business Strategy and Market Opportunities 2 Aside from the live lecture in week 1, you may have seen similar language in the early parts of COMM1100. COMM1180 5 On the question of serving customers’ needs, management asks you to employ two value frameworks that capture two distinct angles of the customer relationship: 1) Reflect on Porter’s four generic strategies and identify the key business strategy that the company is pursuing. Justify your assessment, for example, by contrasting the company’s value proposition to their customers with the competition. 2) How does this strategy help address your company’s market opportunities Specifically: i) Using the skills learnt in Week 2, identify one customer segment for your company and outline a persona for that segment. ii) Using the Value Proposition Canvas, identify the jobs-to-be-done, pains and gains for that persona/customer segment, and the company’s products, pain relievers and gain creators. Submit the Canvas as part of your final report. iii) Explain how the value propositions developed based on your company’s overall strategy match or do not match the needs of your focus segment of customers related to a specific product/service. III. Stakeholder conflicts For this part you can hopefully draw on the expertise that your team collectively gained in Part 1 of this project. Identify one key stakeholder from the company’s “indirect” stakeholders (e.g., the environment, local communities, society, the public, or taxpayers; referred to as stakeholder A below) and one from the group of more immediate non-financial stakeholders such as employees, suppliers, and customers (stakeholder B). Be as specific as necessary when defining these stakeholders. Consider the interplay between stakeholder A and shareholders. Outline potential conflicts due to differing interests and value expectations of these two groups as well as the trade-offs company management is facing when making decisions. Be careful to distinguish the short-term and the long- term consequences of corporate actions that affect this relationship. Repeat this analysis for the relationship between stakeholder B vis-a-vis shareholders. HINTS: The difference between short-term and long-term effects is often driven by some form of investment. The company’s discussion of its business risk factors (often prominently featured in the annual report) can be a good source to find these conflicts. IV. Recommendation for creating shared value Finally, management is very interested in being able to showcase a new initiative around “Creating Shared Value” to the judges of the award and has asked your team to develop one. Take inspiration from our discussion of the CSV and GTP frameworks to propose ONE new initiative (e.g., an individual project that does not change the core business strategy) that has the potential to create shared value and “grow the pie”, respectively, for stakeholders and shareholders in the long run. Your proposed initiative should be informed by and build upon your analysis of the stakeholder COMM1180 6 conflicts above and help resolve or ameliorate one of them. You can be creative, but the initiative needs to still be realistic given your understanding of the company’s value chain and should be consistent with their current business strategy. You should provide a qualitative (not a quantitative) discussion of costs and long-term benefits that is modelled after the GTP criteria, to the extent possible. Management would prefer for your proposal to address some core aspect of the company’s identity or business rather than some cookie-cutter CSR action as this would not be well received by the award judges. Submission format of the final report A complete report covering the 4 big questions and their elements plus additional sections at the beginning and end according to the template provided. (see https://student.unsw.edu.au/report-writing-support). Total length: Maximum 2,100 words. Word count excludes references and appendix. Must be 1.5 line spaced, 2.5 cm left aligned margin, 12-point font (Times New Roman or Arial) and the footer must have ZID and page numbers. All materials used in this report must be referenced in Harvard format. Any assessment submitted without a reference list will not be marked. For details and assistance on Harvard referencing, see https://student.unsw.edu.au/harvard-referencing o Please note that Wikipedia is not an appropriate source for academic work as it is not reliable. Any use of Wikipedia as a reference will result in an automatic zero mark for the assessment. Add the Canvas in the appendix as well as any optional material you consider to be a necessary part of your overall report. Submit via Turnitin link on Moodle by end of Friday of Week 10. Some hints and guiding principles for writing your reports Even though you may find the questions and tasks above numbered and lettered, do not answer each small question separately. The final report, for instance, should visibly separate the 4 big parts (with headings) but use only a small number of sub-headings (if any) within each part. Do not repeat the text of the question or task before answering it. In business, being concise is a valuable skill to have. Your future boss doesn’t have time to read emails the length of novels. You want to provide as much information as necessary to cover the outlined tasks, but you want to make every paragraph count and do not tax your reader. You will find some simple tricks when you Google ‘how to write concisely’ that will help you avoid overly wordy expressions. Sometimes that is not enough, though. A more challenging task is to shorten entire paragraphs by paraphrasing them with fewer sentences. We recommend group COMM1180 7 members write their first draft with content and clarity in mind. On subsequent revisions, maybe by other team members, you can focus on conciseness. Referencing All materials used in this report must be referenced in Harvard format. Any assessment submitted without a reference list will not be marked. For details and assistance on Harvard referencing, see https://student.unsw.edu.au/harvard-referencing Please note that Wikipedia is not an appropriate source for academic work as it is not reliable. Any use of Wikipedia as a reference will result in an automatic zero mark for the assessment. Academic Integrity As a student at UNSW, you are expected to display academic integrity in your work and interactions. Where a student breaches the UNSW Student Code with respect to academic integrity, the University may take disciplinary action under the Student Misconduct Procedure. To assist you in understanding what academic integrity means, and how to ensure that you do comply with the UNSW Student Code, it is recommended that you complete the Working with Academic Integrity module before submitting your assessment task. It is a free, online self-paced Moodle module that should take less than an hour to complete.
