MBA 520 Final Project Guidelines and Rubric

MBA 520 Final Project Guidelines and RubricOverviewBusinesses and other organizations must regularly measure their financial performance and health in order to make operational and strategic decisions affectingthe organization’s future. Management professionals utilize income statements, balance sheets, cash flow statements, and a limitless variety of other reports andtechniques to evaluate an organization. They also work closely with professionals from departments across the organization—including marketing, humanresources, and operations—to ensure that the business runs smoothly and that financial decisions are not made in isolation.For this project, you will use the accounting and finance skills you learned in the course to review the past and current financial performance and health of aglobal, publicly traded company. Based on that analysis, you will create initial financial projections that forecast the company’s performance under differentscenarios and identify internal risks and opportunities in order to begin planning future activities.This assessment addresses the following course outcomes: Assess organizations’ underlying financial performance and health by analyzing relevant financial statements, variances, ratios, and other financialinformationDraw connections between accounting and financial information and the broader organizational context for making integrated business decisionsAssess critical factors driving financial risks and opportunities for informing management prioritiesForecast business performance under different assumptions about inputs and processes using simple financial modelsEvaluate the internal costs and benefits of business opportunities for their impact on budgeting and business decisionsCommunicate financial analyses clearly and coherently for persuading internal stakeholders of the validity of observations and conclusions PromptImagine you are a newly hired manager at a publicly traded, global corporation of your choosing. (Your instructor must approve your choice. You may also choosea non-publicly traded organization, if your instructor verifies that the organization has sufficient financial information available to complete the project.)You have been asked to review the company’s past and current financial performance and health and make initial financial projections in order to begin planningfor the upcoming year. Your supervisor is particularly interested in a fresh perspective on what your analysis reveals about potential risks and opportunities, aswell as recommendations for next steps. Because you will eventually need to convince internal stakeholders, including senior management, of the feasibility anddesirability of your suggested activities, it is important that you justify your projections and recommendations, explaining how they were informed by existinginformation and modeling different scenarios.Your financial analysis and projection report will include several financial tables, along with a comprehensive narrative describing the organization’s context,financial performance and health, and your analytical approach and conclusions. Your report should be geared toward an executive audience with basicaccounting and finance knowledge and should be well organized, clear, concise, convincing, and free of distracting errors. Note that, in addition to the organization’s financial statements and website, other authoritative news sources—such as annual reports and external sites like Bloomberg.com—may offerinsights that facilitate analysis or provide information on the organization’s priorities, challenges, and geographic distribution.Specifically, your financial analysis and projection report must include the following critical elements:I. Executive Summary. Clearly and concisely summarize your principal findings, projections, and recommendations with an eye to persuading busy executivesto support your ideas and to read further. II. Approach. Provide your intended audience with a solid, but brief, sense of the parameters of your analysis and who else you would consult in refining itfurther and why. Remember, your goal is to convince readers of the validity of your observations, while recognizing limitations that affect businessdecisions. III. Financial Performance and Health. In this section, you will evaluate the organization’s recent financial performance and current financial health, given itsorganizational context. In particular, you must cover:A. Organizational Context1. What key features of the organization (e.g., major products or services, customers, location, etc.) help set the boundaries for businessdecisions? In other words, what key goods or services does your organization provide, for whom, where, and why?2. How is the company organized and managed (e.g., by product groups, geographic region, function, etc.)? How does that affectaccounting and financial information and subsequent business decisions?B. Recent Financial Performance1. Assess what the organization’s consolidated income statements for the last three years say about its financial performance. Use relevantindicators, graphs, and spreadsheets to support your narrative. (Include all spreadsheets in an appendix.) For example, what do theamounts and year-to-year changes in revenue, operating income, net profit or loss, and Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation,and Amortization tell you? Do any items stand out?2. Assess what the organization’s consolidated cash flow statements for the same time period say about its financial performance.