The Innovative A’s Consulting Group is glad to run our analysis on your company’s operational process. Your company has done tremendous progress and indeed it is a recommendable success as it started out small and grew to be one of the leading businesses in the industry. In our analysis over the past two weeks, we observed that, if planned well, CanGo has a promising future ahead.
Our team came up with certain issues being faced by your company, which we assume, if not resolved, can cause a problem in the long run for CanGo to be more successful. Your company has been lucky over the past few years, but in our evaluation, we concluded that CanGo’s future needs a great deal of strategic planning. By carefully viewing your company’s videos for the past two weeks, our team came up with 6 major issues being faced by CanGo. Each member of a our team has worked on how to make CanGo’s future a promising one, and we promise if CanGo resolves the following issues, it will have a head start to a long term success in the future:1)Company Goals and Objectives Prioritization: For a company to be successful, it is very important for all its employees to be on the same page. We observed that CanGo is driven towards its goals but there is no unity among its employees.
Although it appears that they may have identified all or most of the objectives, they fail to coordinate and prioritize them in a functional sequence required to accomplish goals and milestones effectively. During a recent team meeting, some of the tasks were identified to team members but the lack of priority was overlooked. A project of this size and technical in nature requires better organization and prioritization of objectives or deadlines and costly oversights will occur. Failing to prioritize objectives can affect the quality of work by team resources by focusing efforts on completing the wrong goal. Information Technology and Project management software would reduce the risk of cost over runs, missed deadlines, and resource disorganization. The company needs to schedule tasks and objectives in a functional sequence, detail deadlines and milestones, and track all aspect of the project to successfully accomplishing their goals.
2)Mission Statement, Vision Statement & Purpose: A company is incomplete without having a certain Mission and a Vision Statement. A well-defined mission and vision is the backbone of any company. Can-Go’s purpose is to provide an inclusive service to entertainment needs via books, CDs, DVDs, and its newly developed prospect online gaming. There seems to be no set direction for the employees to head towards. We noticed that for CanGo to reach its goals, it needs a very well established purpose so that every employee including the CEO is motivated to work towards that purpose.
When Ms. Elizabeth started her company she did not have any idea of what she wanted to achieve for her company or where she wanted to see her company standing in the next ten years. That is why we suggest that for CanGo to enter a new market of online gaming, Elizabeth and her employees need to know their company’s mission, vision ad their purpose to reach get their online gaming idea to be successful.3) Organization CanGo’s main focus should be on organization. In the video some CanGo employees are having trouble adjusting to increased responsibility or reaching the level of organization required to thrive as a larger business. We recommend that CanGo should use a competency development model.
All businesses are based on some key competencies. If any business neglects employee competency and its development, all growth and productivity of an employee, company and profits will be affected.The main reason for an organization to create a competency-based system is that it focuses on having the right people with right skills at the right time. We see that the team needs to decide on the order in which they are going to implement this new online gaming.
They need to get a good team to run this project, and a project manager to oversee the progress of this project. As long as Nick is leading this project, we see that his distractions will ultimately cause failure. He is easily distracted and has no sense of what direction to proceed. Nick has some good ideas as far as what they need to prepare for the online gaming to launch, such as he hardware and how they will obtain bandwidth. The CanGo team also needs to decide if they are capable to take on this project, since most members are not familiar with online gaming they need to decide if they need to bring in outside help.
4)Financial Budgeting: The CanGo organization is lacking a Project Budget. The group is disorganized and unsure if the project can afford necessary equipment and resources required to complete the project. CanGo’s project team or the project manager needs to develop a project budget, including the goal of the project budget. The project manager will use this budget to help determine if the project is on track and the budget will be used by a number of personal as a guideline to fulfill project milestones.
Aspects that need to be considered and included in the project budget are employee compensation, contract services such as hardware and software, equipment and supplies, and the budget should include overhead expenses. Overhead and indirect costs allow the project to absorb part of the administrative costs of the organizations daily operations. Many software options are available on the market today, such as Project Budget Manager and Microsoft Project, which will assist the manager in developing a budget and team to track and analyze the budget. Also, they need to discuss how they are going to pay for the online gaming.
They also need to decide if they want to spend the majority of their money on online gaming. Since this is something that they have never done before, Elizabeth needs to talk to Clark and Ethel and discuss where the company is financially.5) Adapting to the changes in the new Market: CanGo is a company that has grown rapidly. The company seems to have trouble adjusting to this growth. In order to continue to grow CanGo must have the ability to evolve and transition and the market demands. The bottom line for small businesses, especially start-ups, is to focus on those strategies that are at the lowest rungs of the ladder and then gradually move up as needed.
As you go about developing your growth strategy, you should first consider the lower rungs. Each new rung brings more opportunities. (Dahl 2010) In order for CanGo keep their momentum going they must focus on market penetration, market development, alternative channels of pursuing customers, product development and keeping new products for new customers. Competitors will always arise. CanGo must be proactive in developing their employees to operate at a high level to be able to compete effectively. Currently the company seems to be stuck in a mode of doing things as they have always been done.
The company must continue to push innovation and create a culture that embraces change.6)SWOT Analysis: We have noticed one key thing that CanGo is missing is to conduct a SWOT analysis. This can lead to poor decision-making and ineffective goal determination. SWOT stands for Strenghts, Weakness, Opportunituies and Threats. If the company knows its SWOT then it has several motivating factors.
CanGo needs to do a SWOT analysis in order to identify where they are strong and where they are vulnerable. SWOT analysis will make the company take advantage of their strengths, overcome their weakness, grab the coming up opportunities and win againsts its threats in the market. a) CanGo’s strengths are: cost advantage, cohesive workforce, pricing, online growth and market share leadership. b) CanGo’s weaknesses are: bad communication, no clear strategic plan, weak management team, low R&D and poor decision making. c) CanGo’s opportunities are: large variety of online content, product and services expansion and emerging markets and expansion abroad. d) CanGo’s threats are: lack of clear performance goals, ineffective employee evaluation, competition from other online companies and cash-flow problems.We hereby conclude that if CanGo understands it goals, follows its mission, gets its team organized, keeps track of its financial budget, gets innovative ideas to stay in the markets and knows its SWOT then CanGo will be a very successful company in the long run.
