MNG4801/203/0/2018

Tutorial Letter 203/0/2018

Strategic Management

MNG4801

Year Module
Department of Business Management

IMPORTANT INFORMATION
This tutorial letter contains information
relating to Assignment 03
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Contents

1. INTRODUCTION..................................................................................................................................................... 3
2. ASSIGNMENT 03 ................................................................................................................................................... 3
3. ASSIGNMENT INTRODUCTION AND CONCLUSION ............................................................................................... 3
4. THE REQUIRED APPROACH ................................................................................................................................... 3
5. GENERAL COMMENTS .......................................................................................................................................... 4
6. IN CONCLUSION .................................................................................................................................................... 4

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1. INTRODUCTION

Dear Student

This tutorial letter provides detail on what was expected of you for Assignment 03, and should be read in conjunction
with the guidelines to Assignment 03 (on myUnisa under ‘Additional Resources / ‘Assignments’). You can compare
your performance with the assignment evaluation sheet (rubric) in Tutorial Letter 101. It is important to note that it
was your responsibility to ensure that your MNG4801 assignment was correctly uploaded, submitted on time and
received by the University.

2. ASSIGNMENT 03

Overall, the quality of the assignments was good. Assignment 03 required you to construct a strategic management
plan for a company of your choice. This assignment tested your ability to use the theory as a tool to compile
publicly available information, evaluate it against theory from the prescribed material, ultimately resulting in concise,
actionable and practical recommendations. Not only did this provide you with a tangible skill in any industry, it also
provided an opportunity to gain an in-depth understanding on a large part of the work in preparation for the
examination.

Your Assignment 03 should not have exceeded twelve pages. This page limit excluded the cover page, table of
contents, list of references, the reflection template and appendices. The evaluation sheet for Assignment 03
indicated the assessment criteria and is included in Annexure B of MNG4801 Tutorial Letter 101.

You would have been penalised for not adhering to the assignment instructions, the guidelines, poor referencing
and for late submissions. We also expected you to answer each question and follow the instructions. Those who
provided related but not relevant information in answering the questions did not achieve above-average marks.

3. ASSIGNMENT INTRODUCTION AND CONCLUSION

It was important that your essay included an introduction. For this assignment, marks were awarded for a good
introduction under “technical requirements.” Your introduction should introduce the sections of your assignment,
not the broader subject of strategic management. An introduction’s main function is to create expectations for the
reader. Many students used quotes and introduced the importance of strategic management or business level
strategy without stating the purpose of the assignment or alluding to the content which could be expected by the
reader.

Your conclusion should have acted as a summary in which every section is briefly described, thus confirming that
expectations created by your introduction were met. Some students used their conclusions to introduce new
information. This deviates from the scientific method and is considered as poor academic writing. In simpler terms,
your introduction should have said what you were going to discuss in the assignment, and your conclusion should
have indicated what was discussed.

4. THE REQUIRED APPROACH

You had to use the tables in Topic 5 of your Study Guide to guide you. The three main sections that you had to
address were strategic direction, internal environmental analysis and external environmental analysis.

The guidelines released before the assignment strongly advised against using government departments, NGOs,
NPOs, parastatals or state-owned enterprises. These mentioned entities, although using some of the same metrics
and approaches as firms, have other mandates with which they need to comply. These entities receive funding
which is not reflective of their respective performance, but due to external matters outside their control. This in turn
would have led to severe complications in identifying and evaluating the various components required in a strategic
management plan. Many students did not heed this advice, and although several students were able to obtain
above-average marks after a herculean effort to make sense of the mentioned organisations, most obtained only
mediocre results.
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Sourcing the correct information was crucial to a good mark. In most cases, it was evident that students went to a
lot of effort to download and read integrated annual reports from publicly listed firms. Students who used cursory
information from company websites (from the ‘About Us’ sections) or blogs earned mediocre marks at best.

The linchpin to a good strategic management plan was structure and incremental reasoning. This would have
allowed you to make sense of the concepts, and to add to the existing work as the assignment progressed.

The first building block – strategic direction – was addressed in detail by the guidelines to this assignment. The
structure and manner in which the theory, evaluation and recommendations had to be presented was explained
with detailed examples in the guidelines. It was not necessary to have addressed every subsection within strategic
direction, but at least three of the four subsections. This was applicable to the subsequent building blocks as well.

Relating to the internal and external environment building blocks, it was required to try and understand how firms
arrived at their published information. It was not required by students to perform certain analyses relating to the
internal and external environment, but students who did it correctly, earned good marks. More importantly,
adhering to the recipe of stating the theory, conducting an evaluation and providing practical recommendations
would have resulted in above-average marks. Unfortunately, some students performed a rudimentary SWOT and
STEEP analysis with no recommendations and no theory prior to the analyses. This approach would have resulted
in below-average marks.

5. GENERAL COMMENTS

Some plagiarism was detected in the assignments. If any form of plagiarism was detected, you received 0 for that
particular section. Penalties were applied throughout for late submission as stipulated in Tutorial Letter 101 and
the Guidelines to Assignment 03. In some cases marks were unnecessarily lost due to the absence of the
reflection template.

Editing was mostly at a higher level than what was found amongst the previous assignments. Mediocre marks
were obtained when your paragraphs are not justified or your in-text referencing is incorrect and inconsistent. At
postgraduate level, we expect to receive neat assignments that adhere to the following technical requirements:

Font Arial or Times New Roman

Font size 11 or 12
Spacing 1.5 line spacing
Margins 2 centimetres on both sides of the page
Referencing method Harvard Referencing Method (guidelines available on myUnisa)

It was important that a full list of references corresponded to your in-text referencing. Penalties were imposed for
poor referencing and late assignments. We provided you with the rules governing penalties in Tutorial Letter 101 –
as well as in the guidelines to this assignment - and submissions of more than 10 days received no marks. Part of
having a postgraduate degree is demonstrating your ability to submit assignments on time. Technical requirements
include your language, spelling, grammar, writing style and a table of contents.

6. IN CONCLUSION

This tutorial letter provided details about what was expected from you in Assignment 03, and that it should be read
in conjunction with the guidelines to this assignment. The introduction and conclusion was discussed, followed by
the required approach. Lastly, general comments were made on generic problems identified during the marking
process. It is important to take the comments from the markers into account once you have received your
assignment.

Kind regards

Dr Eric Nenzhelele
Dr Catherine Le Roux