This course represents the second, applied part of this semester's IfU-Business Project. (For the first part, see course "1154")

This IfU-Business Project encompasses an applied, consulting-style project to be carried out in cooperation with bauMax, an Austrian hardware store chain, which had to cope with considerable financialand strategic challenges in the last couple of years. The goal of this class isto apply theoretical knowledge in order to analyze financial and nonfinancialdata at the corporate and store level to gain comprehensive insight on how thestrategic decisions made translated into “hard numbers”.

The focus of this project will be on analyzing the key success factors (and threats) of the partner firm’s business model in order to understand the root causes of the turbulences. The project will cover, among others, the following aspects:

• qualitative interviews with key stakeholders involved (e.g. owners, employees, consultants, etc.)
• thorough analysis of financial data across several stores and markets
• detailed analysis of balanced scorecard information (including both financial and non-financial indicators)
• ex-post assessments of store location decisions based on available information
• data-driven identification of leading indicators that signaled potential problems
• documentation of the business case (“case study”) based on rich data sets (both quantitative and qualitative)

After completing this class students will be able to:

• conduct systematic literature reviews
• critically read and make sense of research articles
• structure complex business problems
• design and implement research projects

Apart from that, completing this course will contribute to students' abilities to:

• organize and manage a large-scale project in the field of strategic management and management control
• pursue the project management (PM) activities and master the use of various PM tools
• structure complex and ill-defined problems
• apply theoretical knowledge from different fields to find creative hands-on solutions to real-life business problems.

The final grade of the course will depend on:

• group presentations including peer evaluation: 35%
• project handbook and presentations: 35%
• customer satisfaction - evaluation by partner firm: 10%
• PMO-reporting: 10%
• participation: 10%

Arthur Posch & Markus Wabnegg & Gerhard Speckbacher