Kathmandu University School of Management

Strategic Management

Assignment – I

Submitted by:

Sunim Mainali

157056

Submitted to:

Jayakar Vaidya
An organization XYZ proudly claims they have used true strategic management in practice,
what features do you expect to see in XYZ?

Ans: Strategic management is the continuous planning, monitoring, analysis and assessment of
all that is necessary for an organization to meet its goals and objectives. Fast-paced innovation,
emerging technologies and customer expectations force organizations to think and make
decisions strategically to remain successful. The strategic management process helps company
leaders assess their company's present situation, chalk out strategies, deploy them and analyze
the effectiveness of the implemented strategies. The strategic management process involves
analyzing cross-functional business decisions prior to implementing them. Strategic management
typically involves:

 Analyzing internal and external strengths and weaknesses.

 Formulating action plans.
 Executing action plans.
 Evaluating to what degree action plans have been successful and making changes when
desired results are not being produced.

Importance of strategic management

Strategic management necessitates a commitment to strategic planning, which represents an

organization's ability to set both short- and long-term goals, then determining the decisions and
actions that need to be taken to reach those goals.

The strategic management process is a management technique used to plan for the future:
Organizations create a vision by developing long-term strategies. This helps identify necessary
processes and resource allocation to achieve those goals. It also helps companies strengthen and
support their core competencies.

By determining a strategy, organizations can make logical decisions and develop new goals
quickly to keep pace with the changing business environment. Strategic management can also
help an organization gain competitive advantage and improve market share.
Environmental appraisal helps to find out the opportunities and threats operating in the
environment and organizational appraisal or internal analysis helps to find out the strength and
weakness of organization in order to create a match between them. Some of the basic objectives
of strategy are to integrate the organization with environment. For this purpose knowledge of
environment is necessity. So an environmental appraisal to be done. It includes collection of
relevant information from the environment or environmental issues, interpreting its impact in
the future working of the organization and determines the opportunities offered and threat faced
by the organization in future.

Environmental scanning. To identify opportunities and threats affecting the business it should be
monitored properly and to collect data to derive information about opportunities and threats
that affect the business. The process by which organization monitor their significant environment
to identify opportunities and threats affecting their business is known as environmental scanning.

Organizational appraisal related with appraisal of internal environment. The purpose of

organizational appraisal is to determine the organizational capability in terms of the strength and
weakness that lie in the different functional areas. This is necessary since the strength and
weakness have to be matched with the environmental opportunities and threats for strategy
formulation. Organizational appraisal helps the organization to decide about what it can do. The
important method used for internal analysis is value chain analysis, bench marking etc.

SWOT analysis

A SWOT analysis is a crucial element of strategic management by helping companies identify their
strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. The SWOT analysis helps detect and analyze
internal and external environments and other factors that may impact the business, and helps
organizations prepare for the future. It also aids decision-makers by analyzing key aspects of their
organizational environment to help formulate competitive strategies.

The process is helpful when determining whether the firm's resources and abilities will be
effective in the competitive environment within which it has to function, and when developing
their goals and strategies to remain successful in this environment.
The organization XYZ must have a thorough knowledge and analysis of the general and
competitive organizational environment so as to take right decisions. They should conduct a
SWOT Analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats), i.e., they should make best
possible utilization of strengths, minimize the organizational weaknesses, make use of arising
opportunities from the business environment and shouldn’t ignore the threats. Therefore, if an
organization proudly claims they have used true strategic management in practice we can always
ask for a simple tool that is a SWOT analysis to find out the strategic management practice.