Consultant’s or task force’s report to a firm’s management team

The written report is the consultant’s or task force’s report to the firm’s management team. Although the format of the report can vary based on the situation studied, it should generally include the following information: executive summary (this is a summary of the entire paper including your issue, key conclusions from your analyses, and a summary of the recommendations – approximately 2 pages), issue statement, analysis, and recommendations. The analysis section should demonstrate use of all of the appropriate analytical tools, but since the report is formatted as if the readers were the management team, all models, tools, or jargon should be defined or explained.

Finally, the recommendations should be clear, be fully developed, and include an implementation plan. These recommendations should build from the analysis but not simply state a path or conclusion that the company is already working on. Also, they should be bold.

Important info regarding the recommendation section of the paper:

You can consider and discuss different strategic alternatives to the strategic issues you identified. However, at the end you must stick to one single strategic recommendation and discuss it in depth. Include in your discussion how the recommendation should be implemented, the key resources required to implement it, and the anticipated benefits and risks of the recommendation.

The recommendation must be strategic in scope and not just operational.

Consider the following example:

“On February 6, 2014, General Motors (GM) recalled about 800,000 of its small cars due to faulty ignition switches, which could shut off the engine while the vehicle was in motion and thereby prevent the airbags from inflating” [Wikipedia]

While this sounds like an engineering problem that can be fixed with engineering solutions, it was not. The engineers knew of the issue as early as 2004 and voiced complaints. It was a corporate governance issue which as a main area of firm strategy. GM had no safety executives reporting directly to the CEO to alert him/her to these issues. Its culture focused on cost-cutting so much that they decided not to fix the ignition switch when they knew of the problem because it would have added a single dollar to the cost of each car. So the correct strategic recommendation to GM would be about improving its governance culture and organizational design. That’s the strategic problem. The faulty design of the switch is a mere operational symptom

The project will consist of 11 sections. The pages should be as follows:

Page # Topic

1 Executive Summary1

2 History Background

3 Major Issues

4 SWOT Analysis

5 Porter’s 5 Forces Analysis

6 Value Chain Analysis

7 Resource Based View Analysis

8-9 Business Level Strategy (units, strategy of each, implications), Corporate Strategy, International Strategy (depending on the issue examined)

10 Corporate Governance & Leadership

11 Recommendations

Can you write topic 3 and 4 in about 3 pages, and our chosen company is JC Penny.