Choosing an Organization

In this first week of your course project, select an organization to study in depth over the next five weeks. Each week, your assignment will require you to evaluate this organization. You may use an organization you currently belong to, a past organization, or an organization that you identify through research. Be sure to review the types of information you will need for the project (all five weeks) before choosing your organization. You might need to create some hypothetical details to fill gaps in researched information. However, the project should use as much real information as possible.

You should have your organization approved by your instructor before moving forward with the assignment. Contact your instructor early in the week to gain approval.

For the Week 1 paper, complete the following tasks:

Summarize key details about your organization. What does it do? Who are its customers, clients, prospects, or constituents? For convenience in this class, we will call them customers.

Perform a SWOTT analysis, placing particular emphasis on long-term trends affecting your organization and what your competitors are doing.

Analyze the organization’s mission statement. Does it address the following core components?

Customers—who do we serve?

Product/service—what do we provide?

Market—who/where are our customers?

Core competencies—how do we provide or deliver our product/service? What gives us a competitive advantage?

Measurability—how do we know when we are successful?

Defend a new/revised mission statement. It should be a succinct statement of what the organization is, what it does, and who its customers are. Be sure to support why your revisions are an improvement to the current mission statement.