Hello, dear friend, you can consult us at any time if you have any questions, add WeChat: THEend8_
COMM1180
Assessment
Term Project
Introduction
Purpose
In COMM1180, you are learning about a number of frameworks that attempt to identify, measure or
even create value: Porter’s value chain, Porter’s Generic Strategies, the Value Proposition Canvas
and modern multi-stakeholder frameworks such as “Creating Shared Value” and “Grow the Pie”.
This term-long project will allow you to apply several of these frameworks to a real company case.
Thus, you will need to draw on the knowledge you acquire during lectures and the skills you practice
during the tutorials, especially those of the first 3 weeks. You will also be asked to analyse ethical
dilemmas around corporate decision making and critically review corporate actions.
An additional learning outcome is for teams to learn to collaborate effectively, incorporate different
perspectives, produce quality work according to an agreed plan, and provide constructive feedback
to each other.
Setting the scene
You have been hired as part of a management consulting team by to provide an
outside opinion on several value-relevant aspects of the company’s activities. The management of
the company is keen to raise its public profile and be recognised for being a good corporate citizen.
To this end, they have set their eyes on an award for “Creating Shared Value”1. Your consulting
report will help management to understand their strengths and the challenges they are facing as
they are getting ready to apply for this award.
You will find a lot of company specific information that is relevant to the questions below in the
annual report of your chosen company (available on Moodle). Feel free to use the company’s
website or other credible sources of information to support your arguments. For example, you might
consult related information from a supplier or use product reviews to inform yourself about the
product market. If you do use additional sources, you should highlight the source of the information
with a footnote that describes that source and/or contains an URL.
Timeline
In stage 1 of the project, each student will pick one company and submit a short written, individual
report.
Note that there are several submission steps involved. Students are required to:
1) submit a draft of their report to Smarthinking (UNSW’s free online writing support service)
by Wednesday Week 4 at the latest
2) upload the feedback provided by Smarthinking by Friday of Week 4
3) incorporate Smarthinking feedback into your final individual report and make the final
submission by Friday of Week 5
The first 2 steps of the assessment is formative in that the quality of your draft does not affect your
mark. The purpose of the task is to provide feedback on your writing that you can apply to your final
drafts. You are required to upload your Smarthinking feedback in time to gain access to the
submission link for the final written report. The turn-around time of Smarthinking is quite fast (24-48
hours). However, this still means that you must submit your draft to Smarthinking at least 2 days
before the first deadline to assure timely receipt of feedback. Students should aim to have a well-
developed draft at this point to maximize the usefulness of the feedback. Students then have until
the second deadline to incorporate this feedback. You can find more details about using
Smarthinking for this assignment on the Moodle course page.
In stage 2, students will form consulting teams to combine their perspectives and skill sets to work
on a detailed and critical analysis of several value-related activities of this company. Students
choosing the same company in stage 1 will form groups. This stage will start after the submission of
the individual report and run until the final submission at the end of week 10.
Assessment part Due date (11:59 PM) Weight Deliverable
Smarthinking submission 1-2 days before first
deadline
n/a Draft of milestone
Feedback upload Friday of Week 4 n/a Smarthinking feedback
Milestone submission Friday of Week 5 10% Short individual report
COMM1180 3
Final submission Friday of Week 10 20% Final team consulting report
Stage 1 - Individual Milestone
Fact-finding report
Take a look at the company’s annual report. You can ignore the financial statements in the back.
Near the front, you might notice that, unlike U.S. based companies, Australian companies report a
lot of non-financial information, e.g., the ‘shared value’ they create for their various stakeholders.
Many also use ‘integrated reporting’ - something you will learn much more about towards the end of
this course – to elaborate on how they have grown along the six dimensions of capital (not just
financial capital) over the reporting period.
Individual Task
In preparation for the final report described later on, you are tasked with writing a short report on
ONE non-financial stakeholder of the company (not shareholders or creditors!). The purpose of this
report is to provide your team members with an understanding of the key issues that affect this
particular stakeholder-company relationship.
1) Stakeholder description: Define and describe this stakeholder clearly. The stakeholder
should be specific and not generic, e.g., pick one supplier or a well-defined group of
suppliers of a particular item that the company uses; customers of a particular product or
service; a particular aspect of a community or the environment.
2) Stakeholder relationship with the company: Identify and describe relevant ways in which
this stakeholder interacts with the company, how they affect the company and how the
actions of the company affect them. Think beyond the purely transactional here: What
forms of value does the stakeholder receive from the company (this could be positive or
negative e.g., in the case of pollution) and vice versa?
3) Use the value chain framework to identify and discuss at least one critical primary activity
and at least one critical support activity that will enable the company to create the value or
reduce the harmful effects for your stakeholder identified in (2).
Submission format
• A preliminary report covering the 3 items above plus introduction and summary sections
using the template provided.
• Length: No more than 700 words.
• Must be 1.5 line spaced, 2.5 cm left aligned margin, 12-point font (Times New Roman or
Arial) and the footer must have ZID and page numbers.
• All materials used in this report must be referenced in Harvard format. Any assessment
submitted without a reference list will not be marked. For details and assistance on Harvard
referencing, see https://student.unsw.edu.au/harvard-referencing
COMM1180 4
o Please note that Wikipedia is not an appropriate source for academic work as it is
not reliable. Any use of Wikipedia as a reference will result in an automatic zero
mark for the assessment.
• You must first submit a draft to Smarthinking and then upload the feedback from
Smarthinking by end of Friday of Week 4. This will earn you access to the submission link
of the finalized report. Not doing this will mean that your report may not be marked, and
you have a risk of receiving ZERO in this assignment.
• Submit the finalized report by end of Friday of Week 5.
• All submissions via their respective links under ‘Assessments’ on the Moodle course page.
Part 2: Team Component
Final consulting report
Following the preliminary step of identifying individual stakeholders, you and your team are now
ready to tackle the big areas of concern in the eyes of management as they are on their quest to be
recognised as an organisation that creates “Shared Value”. Your team’s job is to deliver a consulting
report to management on how well the company is tracking along the following dimensions:
1. How well do the company’s words and actions align?
2. How well does the company serve its customers’ needs?
3. How severe are the conflicts amongst its stakeholders and the trade-offs faced by
management?
4. Is there room for improvement, i.e., the potential for creating additional shared value?
Your team leader has analysed these questions and broken them up into many smaller questions
and tasks for you and your teammates as follows:
I. Mission Statement and Business Purpose
In order to address the first question, locate the company’s mission statement or statement of
purpose. It may not be explicitly stated as such, but typically the annual report will contain the
relevant language in a prominent spot.
Can you extract “the why,” i.e., why does the company exist?2 Which stakeholders are central to its
purpose? Could the same language be applied to a firm in a completely different industry? Does the
annual report (or the company’s website) contain enough evidence that these words correspond to
some concrete actions? Thus, render a judgement as to the specificity and authenticity of the
company’s language around its purpose.
II. Business Strategy and Market Opportunities
2 Aside from the live lecture in week 1, you may have seen similar language in the early parts of COMM1100.
COMM1180 5
On the question of serving customers’ needs, management asks you to employ two value
frameworks that capture two distinct angles of the customer relationship:
1) Reflect on Porter’s four generic strategies and identify the key business strategy that the
company is pursuing. Justify your assessment, for example, by contrasting the company’s
value proposition to their customers with the competition.
2) How does this strategy help address your company’s market opportunities? Specifically:
i) Using the skills learnt in Week 2, identify one customer segment for your company and
outline a persona for that segment.
ii) Using the Value Proposition Canvas, identify the jobs-to-be-done, pains and gains for
that persona/customer segment, and the company’s products, pain relievers and gain
creators. Submit the Canvas as part of your final report.
iii) Explain how the value propositions developed based on your company’s overall strategy
match or do not match the needs of your focus segment of customers related to a
specific product/service.
III. Stakeholder conflicts
For this part you can hopefully draw on the expertise that your team collectively gained in Part 1 of
this project.
Identify one key stakeholder from the company’s “indirect” stakeholders (e.g., the environment,
local communities, society, the public, or taxpayers; referred to as stakeholder A below) and one
from the group of more immediate non-financial stakeholders such as employees, suppliers, and
customers (stakeholder B). Be as specific as necessary when defining these stakeholders.
Consider the interplay between stakeholder A and shareholders. Outline potential conflicts due to
differing interests and value expectations of these two groups as well as the trade-offs company
management is facing when making decisions. Be careful to distinguish the short-term and the long-
term consequences of corporate actions that affect this relationship.
Repeat this analysis for the relationship between stakeholder B vis-a-vis shareholders.
HINTS:
• The difference between short-term and long-term effects is often driven by some form of
investment.
• The company’s discussion of its business risk factors (often prominently featured in the
annual report) can be a good source to find these conflicts.
IV. Recommendation for creating shared value
Finally, management is very interested in being able to showcase a new initiative around “Creating
Shared Value” to the judges of the award and has asked your team to develop one.