Business Strategies
Name
Institution Affiliation
Date
Discussion 1
A company using generic strategy – Starbucks
Starbucks Corporation grows its business operations using a generic strategy that highlights its product specialties. The company’s generic strategy mainly focuses on setting the Starbucks business apart from its rival competitors. Additionally, Starbucks Incorporation utilizes a combination of growth strategies that critically influence its business expansion and continued growth. Based on the Ansolf Igor’s market expansion matrix, its growth strategy directly relates to the Starbucks’ generic strategy for market positioning in the coffee industry (Gray et al., 2016). The growth intensive strategy aligns with the generic strategies to maximizing Starbucks Company’s competitive advantage for firm potential success and performance. For instance, business alignment is directly observable in the Starbucks’ continued emphasis on market penetration with their specialties on coffee products – provides these key products to their esteemed customers in different marketing segments. Alignment of its intensive growth strategy and generic strategy is key for reinforcing Starbucks Coffee’s business performance and competitive advantage in an increasingly global competitive market.
McDonald’s generic strategy
McDonald’s’ generic strategy is critical for determining its basic approach to developing its competitive advantage and overall business growth. Being one of the biggest fast-food businesses, McDonald’s utilizes its business growth strategy to support its business expansion and development (Gray et al., 2016). For instance, its strategic model dictates its operational activities, particularly in response to its competitive businesses’ economic changes and activities. Variations in the fast-food market industry impose pressure on the company to reform or adapt its generic strategy. As such, McDonald’s intensive growth and generic strategic change over time to ensure long-time viability.
Strategy Starbucks Co might use to improve their competitive sustainability.
It is recommendable for the Starbucks Company to consider using the broad differentiation strategy for staying ahead in the stiff competitive market (Gray et al., 2016). The strategy involves making the company’s products different from its competitive firms such as McDonald’s and others.
Discussion 2
Earned value management is used as a technique in project management to measure project progress and performance. A project’s success is measured on three key levels: cost incurred, time spends, and scope. Project managers are faced with problems if they ignore to calculate these critical elements (Gray et al., 2016). Earned value management is useful for assessing a project’s progress, feasibility, and success.
A project milestone is a way of measuring, observing, and monitoring the project’s performance and progress. Milestones exist as an intermediate step that must be achieved before reaching a final objective or goal. Essentially, a milestone is a foundation of monitoring project progress.
Control points, necessary steps, and actions are useful for controlling and monitoring project performance. Additionally, measuring the performance of a project is important to check the progressive nature of the project. For instance, cost performance indicates whether the set budget is adequate to finalize the project.
Quality control – control quality is the activity of evaluating whether a service or product meets quality control measures specified for such identified project (Gray et al., 2016). Quality control is imperative in project management because it ensures that everything aligns with the project scope.
References
Pretorius, M. (2018). When Porter’s generic strategies are not enough: complementary strategies for turnaround situations. Journal of Business Strategy.
Gray, R. M., Cook, M. B., Natera, M. T., Inglis, M. M., & Dodge, M. L. (2016). Project Management: The. In Managerial Process”, McGraw-Hill.