MBA Capstone

• Subject Code : MBA600
• University : Kaplan University My Assignment Services is not sponsored or endorsed by this college or university.
• Subject Name : capstone project

Reflection Portfolio 

Table of Content

Week 1 

Part A  

Part B 

Part C 

2. Week 2 

Part A  

Part B 

Part C 

 3. Week 3 

Part A  

Part B 

Part C 

 4. Week 4

Part A  

Part B 

Part C 

 5. Week 5 

Part A  

Part B 

Part C 

 6. Week 6 

Part A  

Part B 

Part C 

    7. Week 7 

Part A  

Part B 

Part C 

    8. Week 8 

Part A  

Part B 

Part C 

    9. Week 9 

Part A  

Part B 

Part C 

    10. Week 10 

Part A  

Part B 

Part C 

    11. Week 11 

Part A  

Part B 

Part C 

    12. Week 12 

Part A  

Part B 

Part C 

Week 1

Part A and Part B

There may be tens or hundreds of competence fields but we will lay emphasis on only Knowing, Doing, and Being. These competence fields refer to the various theories and methods, practical application, and personal values and goals. Knowing competence field implies what knowledge one  should know. The Doing field implies what you’re able to do by using your skills or competence. The last but not the least competence field refers to inter-relationships where how one engages and interacts with others. All of these come along with a number of skills such as theoretical, applied, practical, and reflective skills. A capable strategic mindset has three main components such as systems thinking, re framing, and reflection. Theoretical skills provide us an experience of how the contents of courses that are unrelated actually have a great deal of overlap. After focussing on myself as a whole and developing mindfulness. I am now going to conduct self skills audit and gap analysis. I’m going to consider my theoretical skills. I developed cognitive knowledge and was even able to show practical business relevance of this business knowledge. Using my applied skills, I demonstrated advanced discovery and showed awareness about the lessons learnt in my studies. With the help of my consolidated practical skills, I feel that now I will be able to improve my performance and workplace results. And lastly, with my reflective skills, I can empower myself to find answers and also become an effective business manager. 

Part C: Team’s Reflection

My team’s contribution also allowed me to explore how to self reflect and develop my simple reflective skills by exploring my own skills and abilities. These reflective skills represent my ability  to integrate new information to contemplate its meaning and relevance in terms of the past knowledge and culminating in the decision of whether to modify the existing beliefs and assumptions, future learning styles, and the behaviors based on what I had learnt.  

Week 2

Part A and Part B

It is important to know what theoretical skills are. In addition, one needs to revisit the  theories   that helped in improving performance and creating competitive advantage. There are four theoretical pillars that one must master. Firstly, it is the ability to recall the knowledge acquired in the past. Secondly, you should have an ability to solve problems, by adopting multiple theoretical lenses. Thirdly, there’s also an ability which allows you to use qualitative and quantitative information during the problem-solving process. The fourth and final ability is to integrate the soft skills and use them for knowledge application. Also, it is important to understand that the second component of theoretical skills is the ability to understand strategic problems by adopting a variety of theoretical lenses. 

Part C: Team’s reflection

My team learnt that an overarching role of an effective manager is to create competitive advantage within the firm and enhance performance. Here, the first step is that a business must set itself apart from its competition. To be successful, the business owner must identify and promote itself as the best provider of attributes that are important to target the customers. With my team, I learnt the theoretical skills and the ability to better understand the various strategic problems by adopting various theoretical lenses and knowing when to use them. I also got to know that there may be dangers of assessing strategic problems via the use of just one theoretical perspective is that you could block yourself from understand the true cause of the problem. 

Week 3

Part A and Part B

This week’s goal is to understand how to create competitive advantage in your industry or organisation considering the strategic marketing and operations trends of the future. There also a less-known term known as disruptive marketing that includes digital marketing automation, paid social media advertising, visual media, mobile assets and advertising. I believe that we need to understand the importance of creating a competitive advantage and have done so using strategic marketing and strategic operations. To understand and know better the repertoire in this area. It is important to create competitive advantage in the industry or organisation considering the strategic marketing and operational trends of the future.

Part C: Team’s Reflection

My team learnt that there are various challenger strategies that I learnt. Some of them are frontal attack, flank attack, bypass attack, encirclement attack, and more. They found out that there are a number of marketing strategies that are long-standing and widespread. Moreover, there are those that are yet to be exploited sufficiently by a business. Today, businesses must investigate how adding services in manufacturing organisations can add to their competitiveness. The group believes that they also need to look at the bases for outsourcing or in-sourcing various resources and capabilities. Businesses can also use performance measurement and quality control to find out how measuring operations can change the behavior of its operations. 

Week 4

Part A and Part B

Competitive advantage is an important concept in the field of marketing. It includes employee morale, less employee turnover, better customer satisfaction, financial performance, and more. The work life should be of high-quality and includes balance, work load, diversity, job security, and resources. Also, the quality of service needs to be focussed upon. This involves company teamwork, quality emphasis, and top-management commitment to quality. With great leadership skills and proper and ethical business practices, one can achieve competitive advantage. 

Part C: Team’s Reflection

My group members learned that through growth and innovation, one can achieve competitive advantage. Thus, growth can be achieved structurally through people and acquisition and by market through greater share and sales. This can also be achieved by innovation through new products, ideas, and expert people. I learnt that people have a role in innovation for competitive advantage. To become an innovative thinker, a manager must list the traits that he/she needs to develop and those that must be avoided. The team found out that the main reasons why firms around the world grow are to increase profit, to enjoy economies of scale, and to reduce risk. And, with the help of internal as well as external growth, it is possible for them to increase their size by producing more within and outside as well. 

Week 5

Part A and Part B

In any business, there’s a extremely high-value of marketing and strategy tools and business modelling. There are various tools, also known as analytical models, that should be used as parts of a system rather than isolated elements. I learnt that by using the models multiple times, it could be of great advantage to the business. The analysis must be run on individual products, product lines, market, staff, and more. There are exploratory, descriptive, and casual and relationship research and analyses. One can use either of them. 

Part C: Team’s Reflection

If I talk about the descriptive models, they are  the most simplified ones of the real world scenarios. These can be used to explore and describe the various scenarios. The same models can be used for teaching or exploration of concepts that underpin real-world applications. All the models can used by deploying different techniques. My team discussed that a manager must be consistent and can use the same time frame period as a reference. It is also important to examine divergence if two models differ with similar output. This could imply that further examination will be required. They found out that models are simple guidelines and not codes of conduct. They will help in developing a manager’s judgement and further improve it.

Week 7

Part A and Part B

Data; it is just not research but also is for day-to-day operations. There are basically two types of data. Primary data is the one that is direct or which provides us a first-hand experience and evidence. This could be about an object, event, person, or work of art. On the other hand, secondary data is the one that is already recycled as it essentially reports on pre-existing research. I believe that a manager plays a big role in research. As a marketing manager, one also has a role in data management and research project management. The question of who is going to manage all that valuable data must be answered on time. 

Part C: Team’s Reflection

The group learnt that there may be pitfalls for a good research, so one must set up their research programs accordingly. A manager must decide what the research project should look like. To solve management decision ideas and management research problems, one must brainstorm ideas, search the general background information for the problem and make a list of useful keywords for the research. 

Week 8

Part A and Part B

It is important to note that leadership communication and message dissemination done in a proper manner provides a big support to the business. Change management is a largely used concept by every manager. This individual is also responsible for communicating the message of change in the entire organisation. Change is not always about a major project. Even the smallest of changes have huge impacts on the business. A simple strategy involving change is needed by every business. The stakeholders are an important element and they must remain engaged and committed to the strategy that is going to be used. There are many leadership styles of change that one can use as it depends upon the nature of business. Poor leadership is caused from fear, unaligned strategy, inflexible change design, no commitment, and many more. 

Part C: Team’s Reflection

My team learnt that there are many drivers of a successful change. A clear understanding of the need for change, effective communication, and strong leadership are some of them. They found that nearly all change programs have fall-backs at some point of time. This includes even the smallest and largest programs as well. The team then looked at the various factors that are crucial in making the change successful in an organisation.

Week 9

Part A and Part B

Business reporting and presenting the workplace investigations in a visual and engaging form. This is because reporting to the management is an essential process of providing information to various levels of management. This ensures and improves the effectiveness of the investigation and to take corrective measures, if necessary. While traditional reporting had worked in many businesses before, but now its time to offer a better audio and visual at the work place. This is because textual written reports are less needed now. These days, business reporting uses infographics, dashboard captures, data visualisation and more. I learnt that business intelligence and data analytics together can improve reporting and decision making. Even infographics have evolved in the past few years and become extremely popular and widely-used worldwide. 

Part C: Team’s reflection

The team learnt that infographics transform a simple data visualisation into much powerful yet pleasing form. They found that having a colored-text over a simple black text, will allow for a 80% more attraction to people.  My group members also found that an infographic image can deploy upto five-times more information than a normal page. This greatly improves ones acquisition of new information  as well.

Week 10

Part A and Part B

It is extremely important for a business to be able to measure success and understand the need for contingency. A manager must also build his/her own toolkit for the future to cultivate and improve the entire business’ performance. There exist a lot of myriad metrics that managers can use. I learnt that a simple four-step process has allowed thousands of managers aroudn the world to do that. This starts with defining the objectives, developing a theory, identifying the specific activities, and evaluating the statistics. I also learnt that productivity is highly ambiguous in nature, as its meaning varies between a person to person. While it may be influenced by different factors, in simple terms, it refers to the efficiency with which the inputs are covered into outputs. I learnt that productivity isn't just about your employees, it’s about more of you. One needs to ensure that the work is personally productive and efficient. 

Part C: Team’s Reflection

My team found that a business selects metrics based on a few questions. These ask about the currently placed metrics, future metrics, and how managers can link various appropriate strategic actions to the upcoming metrics. The group also learnt that it is important for a manager to identify those activities that can help in generating the organisation’s objectives. Once that is done, the final step is to evaluate and assess the statistics. 

Week 11

Part A and Part B

The future of work is comprised various elements. It has underlying drivers such as connectivity, machine capabilities, demographics, and social expectations. The information should be available to everyone and must have global accessibility. I learnt that machines have become much capable than they were a decade ago. Their processing power is greatly improved. Nowadays, every business requires Artificial Intelligence and robotics as helping technologies and tools. The structure of economy depends on modularisation, globalisation, and value polarization. 

Part C: Team’s Reflection

The group members learnt that with the help of remote work and crowd-sourcing, new innovations can be born. Businesses can focus more on machine operations as a part of labor displacement via remote work. They also found that disruption is one of the biggest trends that employment is facing today. Technology, demographics, and globalisation are the root causes of disruption. It is important to note that responding to the business is critical because it affects everyone in the business. The pace of change must not be underestimated as well.

Week 12

Part B and Part B

Efficiency and effectiveness are extremely important concepts that every organisation must achieve in all their projects and activities. While efficiency refers to the resources that are expected to be consumed or the resources that are actually consumed, effectiveness is the actual output divided by the expected output. The various metrics include leads, queue times, error rates, customer satisfaction, response times, and many more. I learnt that agile measurement, if done in the wrong manner, can prove fatal for a business.   A firm should try to avoid using too-costly and unbalanced metrics. I believe that  by using  good forecasting techniques, one a find out the probability of risks and failures./p>

Part C: Team’s Reflection

The team found out that there needs to be a balance between the output and activities that are required to achieve that output. A manager must strike positivity between productivity and responsiveness. My group members must be able to predict what could happen or occur in the near future. They also learnt that with the  right amount of quality, a business can achieve the maximum level of satisfaction that it is looking at.