PROJECT DEVELOPMENT AND IMPLEMENTATION:
POD-CAST AND VOD-CAST APPLICATION IN EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTION
I. Executive Summary
This paper analyzes the feasibility of pod-cast and vod-cast application in teaching conditions. In doing this, analytical tools used by organizations undergoing brainstorming are explained to properly identify the most suitable approach in this risky strategy. It is found that the analysis tends to be multi-dimensional with the need to consider internal, external and other factors affecting the project. This is aggravated by the newness of the idea seemingly an extreme course of action. However, with the aid of such identification, a project plan in Figure 1 is created. This figure shows that the project is feasible if right people, process, resources and control are tapped.
II. Introduction
The issue is new to any educational institution. It confronts the problem of uncertainty especially it is a teaching breakthrough. However, many similar institutions have applied and used them in classroom situations. There are also highlighted benefits of the teaching technology. Pod-casting and vod-casting will replace the traditional personal teaching method within a classroom into virtual experience. Thus, students and teachers can have interactive learning and higher understanding of the classroom events and necessary learning. In contrast, this remains a very challenging innovation. Displacement of the traditional methods requires relaxation of barriers embedded in social perception, laws, individual impressions and educational practices.
To address such difficulty, the situation in which the institution will invest on pod-cast and vod-cast technologies will be treated as a problem. Solutions will mitigate the barriers that can impede the benefits that can be derived by the institution. Undergoing case analysis can also justify why substantial investment is necessary to fund the engagement. Is the level of risk at par with the level of returns? Consideration of technical, market and planning dimensions of the innovation can aid decision makers to decide rationally. Also, the actual plan can be made which can guide the institution on the stages in which specific dimensions and their bottlenecks can be addressed. In this report, the institution can measure its depth in acquiring the technology can how it can uplift its market position in the education sector.
III. The Creativity Process
Analysis involves the separation of an intellectual or material whole into its constituent parts for individual study (). A firm that fails to analyze strategies before implementation can adversely affect its operations. Although hasty decisions can solve minor difficulties and problems in the short term, there will come a time that these small loopholes can hurt the operations of the company in the future. Simple employee conflict can end at pointing fingers and shouting to each other in a press conference can result to a tarnished human resources’ reputation. Such is crucial to the promotion of sound company culture and teamwork for the clients that may negatively influence sales.
On the other hand, given that a firm has formulated a policy that analysis is needed in every strategy formation and implementation. Wrong use of techniques and processes that leads to misleading and false conclusions is as good as non-existence of analysis. Identifying a competitive advantage from diversification with the use of internal organization data on available and exploitable resources is a limited consideration. The presence of local policies in the targeted area, absence of primary suppliers and presence of competitor operations are not taken into the paradigm. As a result, difficulties, if not failure, will be dealt upon implementation.
What is needed is a strategic analysis. It is not a simple analysis that only requires focus to a specific factor of consideration. Being strategic, the intention is to pursue a certain objective. Such feat cannot succeed without providing a holistic approach to scan different reactants within and outside the firm. But it does not mean that the firm should consider and study all the factors because it is costly, time-consuming and impracticable. Besides, most effective decisions and strategies are those quickly made into operation.
Because of this, there is a need for a firm to develop simple and practicable approach to strategic analysis but can contribute something of value to effective management. This paper attempts to explain, analyze and interpret analytical models, techniques and processes in such a way to aid a firm to choose its own simple, comprehensive and effective strategic analysis towards effective management.
III. 1. Value Adding Analysis
The process involves the identification of separate organizational activities like selling, production and employee recruitment and the assessment of their value added for the firm. Value added results to additional money the firm receives from its products and services by managing linkages between organizational activities that can create competitive advantage. The bottom line is to situate the primary (logistics) and secondary (procurement) activities in which it can cut cost, produce more or improve quality. For example, the firm decided to transfer its logistics in the hands of a shipping company to cut costs in maintenance and repair expenses or forms linkage between its available technologies like software to train its human resources.
Value adding analysis aids the company to evaluate inefficient and unlinked activities it performs. From the evaluation, it can take necessary remedial steps to create value added linkages. As it cut back costs of production, it has greater control with the price of the product or service that leads not only to price stability but also flexibility. As it lowers its price, it creates additional value to the organizational activities reflected in the increase of revenues, demand and customer base. From strategic analysis of activities that can be improved and ultimately can reduce cost, the company is rewarded with savings.
However, not all value added factors are embedded within the company. The failure of the firm to look outside the organization’s resources and technologies, it can be left behind by its competitors who dig into the advantages of information technology, strategic alliances and economies of scale. With this limitation, the value adding capability of organizational activities can be offset by external factors. It can no longer obtain competitive advantage since other firms not only exploited the value adding activities within the organization but also the value-added opportunities found in the external environment.
III. 2. Open Systems Analysis or Thermodynamics
To answer the limitation of the value adding analysis completely, this model emphasizes the external environment in which a firm belongs implicitly both at industry level and general environment. No specific and obvious process to aid in strategic analysis was illustrated. But it claims absolute assertion. It argues that closed systems, one that disregards the environment, will face deterioration. Because of this, it should maintain relationship within the environment for its self-existence and as well as the whole system. Thus, mutualism serves as the condition that balances and sustains harmony, if not continuum, in the whole system.
In applying to corporate world, the unpreparedness of the firm about political, economic and social forces can result to macroeconomic deficiencies of its strategies. This is the effect of lack of knowledge and reactive tendencies of firms. When the firms within an industry are exhausted with strategies limited within its own resources and capabilities, environmental scanning can provide it with competitive advantage like possible corporate tax exemption, economic recovery, transportation infrastructures, superior quality over competitor’s products and anti-discriminatory features of certain services. If the firm is patient enough to review the outside world, it can exploit resources, issues and spill-over effects of the environment.
Although, long-term success and additional source of competitive advantage is attached to the use of the model, it can be tedious and impractical exercise especially when the firm is small- to medium- scale. For some large firms, the model can only be useful when the firm is really large may be at the multinational level. In addition, some critics attacked the model because of its strict externally-related view. It overlooked the capability of the internal environment to stimulate the external environment. Or companies may view different markets and therefore some factors in the environment are irrelevant to be confined in analysis.
In continuation, the model put concentrated emphasis in belief that the whole is greater than its parts. Such stand is partly the result of its inception from the principle of Thermodynamics or the relationship of heat to mechanical and electrical work. Because of this, the reality in business environment is bypass by the exclusivity and generalization.
III. 3. Strategic Skills Analysis
This is the specific result of value adding analysis of a firm. It analyzes human resource activities that transpire in recruitment, training and performance evaluation. According to (1997), the “process necessitates evaluation of employees' and applicants' knowledge, skills, and abilities intended as effective means of recruiting and maintaining a workforce that can meet the future needs of the organization and its customers”. It provides the same goal as the original model of Porter that emphasizes the “much-needed” link between the firm and workforce.
The impact of such analysis is within the firm. If potential and present employees will be evaluated, human capital that is suitable and can create synergy with the firm’s strengths or can contribute to improve its weaknesses will be hired and retained. The analysis impliedly suggests segregation of the most effective employees and applicants from the mediocre ones. Within the best performing group, future managers and supervisors are detected and protected by incentives and benefits to assure that they will remain existing and useful within the business coffers.
However, the analysis is confronted with underlying constraints and difficulties for effective results. First, the management should realize that every poor performance can be improved. The provision of good working condition and higher wages can serve as motivating tool while the absence of which can result to misleading conclusions about individual performance because skills are not maximized. Second consideration is the period the firm is willing to dedicate to evaluate the performance of the employee or applicant. Poor initial performance because of inexperience and lack of technical knowledge can be solved by providing initial training and hands-on experience. Lastly, every human has the capacity to excel at the right time and at the right job. Immaturity, emotional problems and inappropriate job description can undermine the potential of every aspiring and present employee to develop their skills. Thus, skills analysis could lead to inconsistency behind these restrictions.
III. 4. Competitor Analysis
In order to prepare for a battle, firms conduct a series of competitor analysis to know what areas are to be improved or expelled by identifying present and possible movements of other firms in the industry. Afterwards, they will compare the surveyed resources, capabilities and strategies to their own to initiate decisions and counter-strategies resulting to some form of comparative evaluation. This is a focused-type of complex adaptive model because its area is limited to a certain industry without concern with social issues.
It is a mind game. Managers from other companies also conduct the same analysis only with varying approaches. It can follow written procedures, use other competitor’s methods or explore in its own standards. Since individuals are likely more willing to put their investments and efforts to low-risk engagements than high risks ones, competitor’s analysis helps the identification of such low-risks activities. It serves as mind maps that draw the blueprint of other firm’s characteristics ( & 1995). Hence, knowledge of them can generate competitive actions for the firm in view of larger market scope. For example, as advertising campaign, a rival firm posted in banners in the vicinity of a residential area. Because of competitor activities knowledge, a firm can avoid loosing sales by copying and implementing the same marketing strategy.
On the other hand, competitive analysis is limited to the tendency of a firm to believe on how much a competitor is similar or different from it. At most instances, competitive analysis is gained indirectly from customers, suppliers, price movements and other strategy implementation of the competitor. Since, it is a mind game, one can be trapped to incorrect perceptions which can result to inappropriate strategy. Although it can serve as inference from multifaceted competitor movements, competitor analysis can create helpful but general and sometimes deceptive background of its intentions that can cause false knowledge in its competitive advantage.
III. 5. SWOT Analysis
According to (2003), it is commonly used in marketing and strategic analysis. Strengths and weaknesses are internal and affect the company in the present; opportunities and threats deal with external factors and the future. Because of its dynamism that it looks in several aspects about the firm, including the time horizons in which such analysis operates, it coincides perfectly with the complex adaptive system model.
SWOT analysis evaluates internal strengths of the firm like procurement or marketing or weakness in human resource handling. On the other hand, opportunities can provide answer to the weakness or enforce the strengths while threats indicate potential aggravation the current problem. The identification of these and putting them under analysis can simplify the process of finding solutions to internal problems or possibly find potential source of competitive advantage. Certain government tax exemption scheme for employing certain number of employees can cut cost, hi-tech production machines can serve as fuel for expansion or financial liquidity can be used to gain additional revenue through investment or lending. The use of such technique can result to such discoveries.
However, it is limited in accuracy that it oversimplifies the data gathered. For example, strengths can turn to weakness while opportunities to threats. Although one has the facts from the CEO of the organization, it would only represent a single viewpoint ( 2003). The solution is to interview a large number of stakeholders that is involved in the business like the employees, suppliers, customers, experts and other strategic partners. Because of this, the reliability of SWOT data is the basis of an effective evaluation. The firm should pour some effort to conduct researches for the SWOT to be functional and useful.
IV. The Implementation Process
Branding is an efficient and effective mechanism for a firm to implement marketing endeavors to satisfy customer and other stakeholder needs (, 1999). The institution uses branding to deliver a message of modern style on its products. With global acceptance of the quality and elegance of institution brand, the institution is able to effectively gain market presence in the industry ( & , 2001). This is due to its ability to differentiate its product from competition with the use of branding for value-orientation. As a result, it is able to transfer excessive marketing and discount costs on providing new, dependable and stylish products (, & , 1994). Brand management is a business concept intended to protect the brand of institution from strategic or legal demise and continue harvesting profits from its establishment.
The brand management process (BMP) initially involves internal auditing and external scanning (, & 2003). Questions will emerge such as “Who the brand is for?”, “Where is the company now?” and “What is the market going or how competition going?” ( 2006). For institution to carry BMP and improve performance/ efficiency, it should re-evaluate the positioning of its brand and its impact to stakeholders including competitors. This is signaled by partially identifying the threat of loosing potential customers within the working class earlier as their products may be perceived too expensive. BMP offers a platform to determine the weaknesses of branding and enhancement of its strengths as inputs are set for analysis. As marketing is a battle of perceptions not products, the innovation and style focus of institution could be in a loophole. In effect, the scanning stage of BMP can rationalize its current branding.
Second, the formulation of a branding plan will be developed. As observed, corporate actions are identified to manage the nature of stakeholders which is almost dynamic at all times (, 2002). This stage also post responsibilities to specific actors within the organization that can entail additional motivation to obtain desired member efforts regarding the additional tasks to consider. Budgeting is also emphasized at this stage that can serve as a limiting factor regarding the extent of a particular branding strategy. The third stage is the implementation process in which the plan is actually tried in the actual operations. The institution is confronted with varying corporate performance, competitor’s retaliations (, , and ) and changes in the behavior of customer as well as employee regarding the plan. If the firm has no learning curve to base contingent actions, it is only suited for the plan to impose loss limitation or performance targets to reduce the risk associated with the implementation.
Controlling is very important to maintain the lifeblood of the company which is observed in its financial resources. Brand equity can be a useful measure to rationalize the effectiveness of the plan implementation (, 2000). Controlling can be attained firsthand when direct marketing is implemented wherein there is a close communication between the institution and the customers. However, the plan can be out of control (thus, leading to excessive marketing loss) if customer feedback is not obtained or repeat purchase takes ample time to happen. BMP assures that institution can test the quality of the implemented plan by installing measurement techniques. Lastly, evaluation of the plan performance is necessary to determine its overall effectiveness and usability in the future engagements of the firm. Record-keeping is crucial to obtain accurate evaluation which is largely based on historical data, corporate reports and external conditions. Since the plan can help the firm in two ways, that is to learn or readily earn, evaluation classifies the plan and identifies its weakness that can be polished to come-up with a more profitable one in the coming years.
On the other hand, the communication of institution is strong due to its primary focus to university students who have purchasing power necessary to buy the premium price of institutional innovation on pod-cast and vod-cast. Since the ultimate end of an effective communication is the achievement of the sender’s purpose in delivering the message ( & , 2004), elements of communication within the institution’s strategy exemplifies satisfactory features. First, the branding image of institution is simplified by its logo in which aid in consistency and ready impression from the intended market. Aside from the logo, educational presentations that is usually the alley for marketing endeavors of institution is an excellent sender platform to arouse the interest of the receiver of the message. Known celebrities can also be highlighted so that institution products can concretize its image. Customer experience with the logo and presentations can build customer trust.
Second, the message is straightforward and in-line with the goals of the firm. Institution enjoys the ability of their brand to be unintentionally marketed by the end-users through word-of-mouth. This made institution messages simple and merely wants customers to be reminded that the firm is an on-going concern trend. Third, the channel institution chose is diverse. It has outlets all over the world just like other industry competitors. Being visually observable through channels is important for institution to maintain and increase market share (, 2002). This is because the supply of modern consumers is very sophisticated, brand-conscious and has high bargaining power. In effect, the inability to access advertising outlets can pose inconvenience to customers that may lead to brand shifts.
Fourth, in relation to the channel, the customers of institution is typically located in the high-end market making a very high purchasing power due to them that pose lower switching costs for brand shifts. Their dependence to institution products is quite independent because of the presence of different competitors. In effect, institution should level its communication strategy with the competition if not better that can meet the convenience needs of the consumers. Fifth, the feedback of customers should be collated for the purpose of improving or changing communication strategy. The booming internet use can be an opportunity to obtain feedbacks that can be used to form a database. Since a feedback is the determinant of communication success, the institution can pour large amount of investment in their website.
Bibliography
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Figure 1: Gantt Chart of Promotional Campaign for the Year 2008
Activities
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1. Planning phase which includes developing promotional plan objectives as well as estimating both explicit (financial) and implicit (stress/ resistance from employees) costs
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2. Product Line, Distribution Channel and Supplier Assessment
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3. Rationalization/ Implementation of Product, Place and Suppliers
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4. Reconstruction of advertising outlet and to rationalized strategy
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5. Training of Personnel
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6. Media Advertising (website, print, TV, radio) that formally announces the institution’s use of value strategy
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7. Publicity through fairs highlighting the rationalized products. This would entail distributing “enrolment cards” particularly aimed for first time customers that avails them to great surprises in their first visit.
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8. Sales promotions will be made available for current customers
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9. Monitoring and Evaluation of the Promotional Plan which includes time data comparison of number of customers, sales and other costs.
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10. Monitoring of economic indicators and effects to the plan
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11. Contingency Actions/ Reactions
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