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Course Project Part 3—Making Strategy
This week, you will continue developing your project research and analysis on the emerging
technology topic you selected in Week 1. You will continue research of scholarly sources
from the South University Online Library and the Internet to further develop your
bibliography.
For this assignment, you will conduct scenario planning for your organization to provide a
framework that addresses the complex and volatile environments in which you will deploy the
emerging technology you chose and analyze the underlying uncertainties associated with that
decision.
Tasks:
Utilizing the concepts introduced this week, address the following tasks pertaining to your
project topic:
o
o
Define some main issues that are important for your organization to understand better as
a function of time, scope, and other decision variables. Identify the major stakeholders
(or actors), internal or external, who would have an interest in these issues. Substantiate
the relevance of your issues with supporting sources from your research.
Identify and discuss at least 20 key forces that would be shaping the future of the
organization in conjunction with the emerging technology decision, from the perspective
of the issues defined in the preceding task. Forces that you would want to consider might
cover technological, business, economic, social, ethical, legal, or political factors, just to
mention some typical domains. In an actual scenario-planning analysis, you would
engage your organization, or possibly some external consultants, to rate each force in
terms of its predictability (using an index from 1 to 5, where 1 is very unpredictable and
5 is very predictable) and importance (using an index from 1 to 5, where 1 is very
unimportant and 5 is very important). For this project, assign and justify your ratings
yourself on the basis of your research. Represent your forces as points labeled F1 –F20 on
an X-Y diagram, where the X axis represents the Predictability index and the Y axis
represents the Importance index, as shown in the figure below (which depicts an example
with twelve forces).
o
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Next, you will use the framework developed under the second task above to refine some key
trends and uncertainties. Out of the important forces that tend to be predictable from your
diagram in the second task, identify trends that might affect the issues of interest. Discuss
how each trend will continue to exert an influence on the future and substantiate your
assertions with supporting sources from your research. Also, out of the forces you identified
in the second task, which tend to be important and unpredictable, identify key uncertainties.
Now, as you continue your heuristic analysis, you will select the two most important key
uncertainties. Represent possible outcomes in a two-by-two matrix (table) where each
dimension is represented by one uncertainty with two possible outcomes. Each cell of the
matrix obtained will represent a possible scenario (for a total of four). Develop each of the
four cells as a full-fledged scenario by incorporating outcomes from other uncertainties, as
well as key trends. Refine the assumptions in each scenario by addressing the following
questions: Are the trends mutually consistent? Can the outcomes you assumed coexist? Are
the actions of stakeholders compatible with their interests? You may want to examine and
address possible internal consistencies in light of additional research on the emerging
technology you chose. The figure given below shows how two important uncertainties, with
two outcomes each, can be represented diagrammatically.
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Explain how you would revisit your scenario-planning procedure and use your scenarios to
devise strategies and test them to address the full range of scenarios.
Complete the assignment in approximately 8-12 pages in a Microsoft Word document. In
APA format, cite any sources you use on a separate page. The references you cite should be
credible, scholarly, or professional sources. Any examples you cite must be supported with
sources from the news media. Note that the title page and header may remain the same as
in Weeks 1 and 2. The abstract can be similar to the one in Week 2 but modified to cover the
objectives of Week 3. The references should contain your sources from Week 2 and any new
sources added this week. In the interest of space economy, the content of your Week 3 paper
should only include the material you need to add to address the questions in Week 3; you
need not include your responses to the Weeks 1 and 2 questions.