Improving competitive strategic planning concepts: a study to enhance professional practice in professional services

This dissertation, which is also referred as the Summary of Learning of a professional doctorate, is intended to 'pull together all the learning that had taken place' situated at the workplace. As this doctorate is oriented towards professional practice, with its emphasis on theory informing practice and practice in turn refining theory, it therefore includes distilled professional learning from the past as well as the learning synthesised from the workplace based projects. This in turn forms the basis and framework to which, new 'working' knowledge is formulated and contributed. This 'thesis' entitled strategic planning, discusses two key topics of competitive strategy formulation and strategy implementation effectiveness are studied through two sequential integrated workplace based projects. Managers are sometimes tasked with the responsibility of formulating competitive business strategies. Mintzberg (2005), once criticised managers that they 'analyse and plan like mad; they just don’t strategize'. This criticism is rightly justified because managers are often at a loss when required to formulate strategies. The managers engaged in the development of the Strategy Formulation Process (SFP), strategy models based primarily on Porter’s (2004) work on competitive strategy, the Integrated Situation Assessment Framework (ISAF) and other various strategy models reported that they have become more equipped and knowledgeable to undertake such future assignments. Likewise, the managers engaged in the development of the strategy implementation evaluation process (PEAR), Situation Implementation Effectiveness Evaluation (SIEE) model and matrix based on the academic work of the strategy evaluation by Johnson, Scholes and Whittington in 2008 have also reported that these new tools and processes are helpful in their understanding of how to evaluate the strategy and their implementation effectiveness. Their reflection and learning point to 'change' and new knowledge in terms of both academic and functional knowledge which has benefited both business stakeholders and related community have been documented. The application of Action Research methodology, appropriate for workplace based learning is reaffirmed through my collaboration with these managers in solving these two workplace problems. Real time distilled learning is acquired through reflection-in-action during the projects and past learning is distilled through reflection-on-action which when combined makes up the total reflective learning experience through workplace based learning.