Course Project Part 3—Making Strategy

This week, you will continue developing your project research and analysis on the emerging technology topic you selected in Week 1. You will continue research of scholarly sources from the South University Online Library and the Internet to further develop your bibliography.

For this assignment, you will conduct scenario planning for your organization to provide a framework that addresses the complex and volatile environments in which you will deploy the emerging technology you chose and analyze the underlying uncertainties associated with that decision.

Tasks:

Utilizing the concepts introduced this week, address the following tasks pertaining to your project topic:

• Define some main issues that are important for your organization to understand better as a function of time, scope, and other decision variables. Identify the major stakeholders (or actors), internal or external, who would have an interest in these issues. Substantiate the relevance of your issues with supporting sources from your research.
• Identify and discuss at least 20 key forces that would be shaping the future of the organization in conjunction with the emerging technology decision, from the perspective of the issues defined in the preceding task. Forces that you would want to consider might cover technological, business, economic, social, ethical, legal, or political factors, just to mention some typical domains. In an actual scenario-planning analysis, you would engage your organization, or possibly some external consultants, to rate each force in terms of its predictability (using an index from 1 to 5, where 1 is very unpredictable and 5 is very predictable) and importance (using an index from 1 to 5, where 1 is very unimportant and 5 is very important). For this project, assign and justify your ratings yourself on the basis of your research. Represent your forces as points labeled F1–F20 on an X-Y diagram, where the X axis represents the Predictability index and the Y axis represents the Importance index, as shown in the figure below (which depicts an example with twelve forces).

• Next, you will use the framework developed under the second task above to refine some key trends and uncertainties. Out of the important forces that tend to be predictable from your diagram in the second task, identify trends that might affect the issues of interest. Discuss how each trend will continue to exert an influence on the future and substantiate your assertions with supporting sources from your research. Also, out of the forces you identified in the second task, which tend to be important and unpredictable, identify key uncertainties.
• Now, as you continue your heuristic analysis, you will select the two most important key uncertainties. Represent possible outcomes in a two-by-two matrix (table) where each dimension is represented by one uncertainty with two possible outcomes. Each cell of the matrix obtained will represent a possible scenario (for a total of four). Develop each of the four cells as a full-fledged scenario by incorporating outcomes from other uncertainties, as well as key trends. Refine the assumptions in each scenario by addressing the following questions: Are the trends mutually consistent? Can the outcomes you assumed coexist? Are the actions of stakeholders compatible with their interests? You may want to examine and address possible internal consistencies in light of additional research on the emerging technology you chose. The figure given below shows how two important uncertainties, with two outcomes each, can be represented diagrammatically.

• Explain how you would revisit your scenario-planning procedure and use your scenarios to devise strategies and test them to address the full range of scenarios.