For this assessment it is required to conduct an analysis of the Etihad Airways organisation’s internal and external environments, then make recommendations as to how the organisation might maintain or improve its competitive advantage.
Specific instructions:
You should adopt the mind-set of a business strategist for the Etihad Airways organisation to base your report on.
Executive summary:
An executive summary of a report is just that, a summary (and is not included in your total word count for this assessment). It contains a statement of report purpose and an overview of the actual and specific findings.
Introduction:
This is a brief statement of the purpose of the report, what its objectives are, and an overview of how the report is structured.
Recommended strategic direction:
The purpose of this section is for you to make recommendations regarding the strategic direction of the organisation. That is, are the organisation’s current strategies prudent? And, should the organisation change its strategies?
You must make recommendations for both business-level strategy and corporate-level strategy in this section:
a) Make recommendations regarding business-level strategy by discussing the organisation’s generic strategy (i.e. cost leadership, differentiation, focus, or combination of the strategies). You should discuss why the organisation should retain or change its current generic strategy in order to maintain or improve its competitive advantage.
b) Make recommendations regarding corporate-level strategy by discussing whether the organisation could create additional value through any of the corporate-level strategies
You should critically discuss why different strategic approaches may or may not work. For example, if you recommend that the organisation changes to a ‘focused differentiation’ strategy, then you should discuss the benefits and pitfalls of a focused differentiation strategy, and also discuss how a focused differentiation strategy will enable the organisation to maintain or increase its competitive advantage.
It is important that you use applied (i.e. newspaper, trade journal articles etc.) and/or academic literature to support your recommendations in this section.
Conclusion:
Within this section restate the purpose of the report, then provide an overview of main points covered in your analysis. Ensure that you do not include any new information, only that which has been discussed within the main body of the report.
Reference list:
All works cited must be included in your reference list.
Appendices:
This is an optional section in which you are able to place relevant material which would have otherwise disrupted the logical flow of your report e.g. business data reports.
Material included in this section will not count towards the overall word count for this assessment. Be conservative with the volume of information you include in your appendix. Inserting vast volumes of material here will not necessarily earn you extra marks.