Strategic Audit (Case Study Armor)

Instructions

You will develop and submit a strategic audit on a case assigned by your professor. This is a
major assignment which is designed to use almost everything you have learned in the program
and in this course. It is a substantial assignment that is worth around one-third of the points in
the course. The rubric that your professor will use to assess your strategic audit is posted on the
course site. To do well on this assignment, consider the following:
Follow the progression of components on the rubric. Use a heading for each component, and
cover everything in the same order as the items are covered on the rubric. This will allow your
professor to more easily grade your strategic audit, and will help to ensure that you receive the
best grade possible.
Do not leave anything out! If you skip an item on the rubric, you will get a zero for that item.
Those zeroes really hurt your grade. So, make sure that you cover every item.
There is a reason that the strategic audit is a TurnItIn assignment. Please do your own work! You can discuss the case with your colleagues, but your submission should be your own. Make sure
that you appropriately reference all sources. And do not copy from some other student’s audit of
the case that someone has posted on the web. If someone is foolish enough to allow his or her
strategic audit to be posted on the web, then you do not want to trust that person’s analysis!
Outside research is necessary. Library or Internet research is often necessary to identify
members of the corporation’s top management and board of directors, or to supplement industry
and/or firm information provided in the case material.
Please stay true to the ending date of each case. Information available after the ending date of
the case should not be considered in your analysis. Just because a firm chose a particular
course of action does not mean that it was correct in doing so.
Many of the items in a strategic audit lend themselves to lists or bullets. You are not required to
use complete sentences. While this is not an English Comp class, correct grammar, spelling, and
proofreading will increase the likelihood of a good grade.
In grading your strategic case audits, your professor will give the most consideration to the
quality of your analysis. Analysis focuses on meaning. Merely listing facts is not sufficient, even if
you list great numbers of them; your understanding of the meaning and implications of the facts
is critical. For example, it does little good to compare financial ratios with industry averages
unless you then use that information to determine the financial condition of the firm and the
implications for strategy formulation and implementation.
Students are often tempted to give little effort to the final sections of a strategic audit, especially
implementation and evaluation/control. Probably the most overlooked is implementation. Often, the implementation of a strategy is vastly more important than its formulation. Omitting or giving
little attention to the final sections of the audit will result in the type of grade that you do not want
to receive and your instructor finds no joy in recording.