Course in Managing Strategy Implementation & Business Transformation

In recent years, the group has provided new inputs through its research, teaching and consulting on corporate restructuring, merger activity, competitive strategies and international business. A few optional courses on these are offered and more are planned.

COURSE OBJECTIVE :

This course intends to equip the students with the concepts, methodologies and tools for management of the process of strategy implementation and review of the strategy itself as it is deployed- in the light of the ongoing changes in market, technology and society.

COURSE CONTENT :

The cornerstone of this course is the use of the concept and the methodology of the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) as a strategic control and learning system. Through an ensemble of business cases, video presentations and interactive multi-media computer simulated business game, the students are imparted two types of skills. First, how to translate a business strategy into a theory of the business through a set of causally inter-linked actionable goals and measures in the BSC, covering four critical perspectives of business, viz., financial/shareholder, customer, operational , and human capital. Second, how to use and implement the BSC as the foundation of an integrated strategic management system that deploys the strategy through an iterative review process which seeks to continuously validate the strategy as it is deployed by using a double-loop learning process. The coverage on BSC, which will be the first module of the course, would be about 40% of the total course duration.

The second module, which would constitute about 30% of the course, is devoted to the symbiotically related topic of Activity-Based Management. After introducing the students to the basic concepts of the Activity-Based Costing, they are engaged in application of the tools of Activity-Based Management in different industry contexts - again through a series of case analyses and video presentations.

The third and the last module of the course exposes the students to the whole range of process based business transformation strategies like :

· Total Quality Management
· Business Process Reengineering
· Competitive Benchmarking, and
· IT-enabled Value Chain Management through ERP

PEDAGOGY :

The course uses a rich pedagogy involving :

· Extensive use of case discussions (about 15 international best-seller cases),
· A Multi-Media Computer Simulation Game (involving strategy implementation in a dynamic environment in a mythical software company) which is to be played by the students as a project, over the duration of the course, and
· Presentation of HBS video-cases on all important topics to be covered by the course.