MGT60040 Management Analyses & Problem Solving Report 2 Sample

MGT60040 Management Analyses & Problem Solving. Ass 2

Assignment overview

This unit has looked at gap analysis as a powerful technique to identify gaps between the present
and future (desired) state of an organization and provide recommendations on how these gaps may be bridged. For this assignment, you will work in small teams of 3–4 to perform a gap analysis based on an organizational issue that you identify as a group based on your awareness of an organizational issue (through news, social media or by your own research).

You will be using the PrOACT approach to decision-making to help us develop an easy-to-use, robust, decision-making framework that ultimately helps us solve problems better, and helps explain the process more transparently.

[PrOACT stands for: Pr-oblem; O-bjectives; A-lternatives; C-onsequences; T-radeoffs]

This approach helps break down a problem into component parts and offers alternatives worth considering, along with some analysis of tradeoffs and consequences of choosing each alternative under consideration.

You will record the findings of this analysis in both a written report and a PowerPoint presentation.

Written Report 

Your written report should be 2500 words (+/- 10%) in length and will describe the analysis you
have undertaken on the data you have gathered through news/media reports or research. You must use only secondary data sources.

What is required?

1. Identifies the problem properly and does a gap analysis of where the organization is at present
and where it wants to be (performing SWOT analyses)

2. You should discuss the objectives or criteria that are most appropriate to the organization (for example cost; time; organizational capacity; etc.); You can formulate and present a means and fundamental objectives table.

3. You are advised to propose 4-5 distinct alternatives/options for closing the identified gap(s);

4. Analyse how well each alternative fares against the objectives/criteria chosen (including objectives by alternatives table);

5. You need to provide a recommendation as to which alternative you suggest the client should
choose. This should be done by performing/illustrating dominated alternatives and applying Evan swap technique to choose the best alternative. This can be illustrated in a table titled consequences table.

6. Discuss any risks, uncertainties and linked decisions associated with the chosen alternative.

7. Steps to implement the chosen alternative that helps close the gap between where the organization is now and where it wants to be.

8. Conclusion

You are advised to write the report using business report format
(https://swinburne.instructure.com/courses/44522/files/18000211?module_item_id=2755319),
incorporating Swinburne’s recommended APA referencing style guide.

Team presentation (20 marks - 40%)

All students registered for on-campus workshops must present in-class to meet the requirements of this assignment. Online or voice-over presentations will not be accepted. Offshore students will present during online workshop (week 11) via collaborate ultra. Your team presentation must incorporate the key elements and recommendations of your report. The team presentations will be held during week 10 and 11 of the semester. You are required to also submit the

PowerPoint Presentation 

Slides via Canvas.

Each team member is required to produce some element of the presentation. This should involve:

• 3–5 slides per person

• 3–5 minutes of narration per person.

Solution

Introduction

This paper will shed light on Qantas as well as its operations. This report has identified some of the significant issues faced by the company along with its objectives. This study will also evaluate the company's functions and whether the company functions are following its objectives. As per MBA Assignment Expert, A SWOT analysis will be done on Qantas to identify its weaknesses. Those have been evaluated further to identify alternatives Qantas could consider to mitigate the challenging factors and achieve the objectives. In order to help the organisation bridge the gaps between its goals and its actual situation, one solution has been selected to present to the client for further consideration. Risks, uncertainties, and linked decisions associated with the chosen alternative have been elaborated in brief. Finally, some steps have been shed light to implement the chosen alternative effectively.

1. Problems based on SWOT 

This section will highlight the four elements of the SWOT analysis of Qantas by focusing on its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. 
Strengths

● Cost-efficient Operation

The company has been operating its functions in the market for over a century. Over these years, it has acquired experience saving operational costs to reflect through the generated revenues. For the last three years of its operation in the market, Qantas was able to save $2 billion in yearly costs (Heiets, Oleshko & Leshchinsky 2021). This was accomplished by working together with the airlines and the unions to cut back on the unwarranted compensation increases and the 18-month pay freeze. 

● Expansion of Domestic travel 

In Australia, the hospitality and travel industry is emerging rapidly, and thus, the rise of domestic travel has been observed. Some of its market competitors have been found to stop expanding their capacities during the post-pandemic scenario, primarily intended to recover from the significant financial losses (Heiets, Oleshko & Leshchinsky 2021). Qantas has identified this opportunity to expand its businesses in the Australian market. Thus, the airline industry was able to fill more tickets to enhance its domestic market returns to some noticeable margin. 

● Growth 

Qantas has been performing its operations in the market for a century now, and over these years, it has gained much experience in developing suitable strategies for maintaining consistent growth. The company has considered multiple strategies or methods to maintain its revenue inflow since the beginning. Thus, in the contemporary scenario, it has been found to use a robust strategic framework to support it as a backbone (White, 2018). 

● Brand Awareness 

Qantas invests much in creating brand awareness in the global market, especially in the Australian market. In order to do this, the company considers using social media platforms, innovative advertising strategies, print media, and public relations (White, 2018). Significant events also have been found to be launched on behalf of Qantas from time to time. Hence, it has been identified to be one of its strengths. 
Weaknesses 

● Disputes in Union 

Due to a complex operational structure, Qantas has faced major unionization issues. This was due to the company not being able to fulfil the requirements of its unions to some extent which made the company struggle to maintain the established connection. Additionally, several outside forces forced Qantas to make significant adjustments to its business strategies and operations, which were later found to be at odds with the needs and demands of the affiliated unions, including the Transport Workers Union and the Australian Licensed Aircraft Engineers Association (ALAEA) (Raynes & Tsui, 2018).  

● Failed financial planning 

It has been found that Qantas was not able to do its financial planning appropriately. Evidence suggests that the company could have used more capital to make significant improvements within its functions as well as provide quality services to the consumers, which has not been done (Raynes & Tsui, 2018). This was primarily due to the company's primary focus on reducing operational costs, which made it miss some valuable changes within its internal structure. 

● Directorates 

The company has planned to offer direct flights between Europe and Australia. In this case, it has been done swiftly and without any error. When it comes to offering long-distance flights, Qantas has faced multiple issues, including generating profitability for the company and creating demand with a competitive pricing strategy. This is primarily due to high market competition and maintaining correct pricing for the services. 
Opportunities 

● Economic Advantages 

During the current scenario, increased consumer spending can be observed in the airline's services, especially during the post-pandemic (Heiets & Prakittachakul, 2020). Hence, it has been considered one of the significant opportunities for the company to consider. 

● High Demand 

Increased cargo service demand will likely grow significantly within the next few years. Hence, it has been considered a massive opportunity for the company to grow in the target markets and expand its business functions. 

● Low Inflation rate

Since the market is stable enough to support the airline businesses, it has been considered to be another opportunity for Qantas to provide services at a competitive price range due to a low inflation rate (Heiets & Prakittachakul, 2020). 

● Increased Business travel 

During the post-pandemic, an increment can be observed within business travel, which would also benefit Qantas to provide services for the business classes. This has created many scopes for the company to generate desired revenues from the market as the frequency of business travel has increased significantly. 
Threats 

● Market competition 

The airline industry is emerging, and thus, more businesses are showing up each time. This has put the company under pressure to attract consumers from the market. 

● Increasing pay

Rising pay levels and prices have become significant concerns for Qantas (Oxenbridge et al., 2010). 

● Management cost 

The fuel cost is rising along with other management, which has been identified as a threat. 

PROACT Approach

Problem Statement 

Qantas has been facing major financial issues, especially during the post pandemic as the company was going through major financial losses and was unable to fulfil the demands of its stakeholders involved with the company. The company also faced financial issues due to the lack of effective planning, which eventually led to creating multiple issues within its long-haul flights. Furthermore, the company has been focusing on reducing its operational costs by following strategies and methods, and due to this, it was unable to focus on introducing innovation and creativity to performing its business functions. This also failed Qantas to recover from the financial losses. 

2. Objectives of Qantas

The objectives of Qantas should be:

● Mitigating the financial issues: This is the primary objective of Qantas in order to recover from the major financial losses that were caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. 

● Focusing on effective financial planning: This has been chosen to be another objective of the company as this would allow Qantas to solely focus on the budget allocation. 

● Considering innovation in performing the business functions to recover from the financial losses: This objective would support Qantas to take help of innovative approaches in reducing the financial gaps within its core operations. 

3. Alternatives to be considered by Qantas

Focusing on unionisation 

Qantas can focus on improving its unionisation by meeting their requirements and reaching a mutual understanding for generating desired profits for both sides. This would add additional support from its unions which would further contribute much to its financial planning. 

Enhanced financial planning 

This would help Qantas make innovative changes within the workspace and services, allowing it to use the capital appropriately. Thus, Qantas would be able to solely focus on the budget allocation to be appropriate that would further help the company mitigate the financial losses. 

Determining the service qualities

Qantas can provide competitive services to meet consumer demands and also generate profitability. This would improve the brand image of Qantas. This would help Qantas to generate more revenue from the market that would help deal with the financial losses. 
Innovation 

The company can consider innovation in making suitable changes within its operations, which would further help it mitigate the competition and financial planning-related issues. 

4. Analysis of the Alternatives

This section will analyse each alternative chosen for Qantas to consider to mitigate the gaps between where the company is in the current situation and where the company is aiming to move. 

Focusing on Unionisation 

As per the statement of Whitley (2022), the COVID-19 pandemic has affected all kinds of businesses, especially airline services such as Qantas, due to the temporary lockdown situations as well as restrictions for people to travel from one place to another. Hence, it has highly affected the financial health of businesses like Qantas. In order to recover from this adverse situation, organizations such as Qantas had to focus on making changes within its operations to some noticeable margin which would further support the organization restore their financial health and re-establish the brand image within the target markets. The unionization process has been complicated in the instance of Qantas because the demands of the affiliated unions have been seen to shift in response to the pandemic. In contrast, the company itself was focusing on restoring its brand reputation. Thus, Qantas was unable to consider its demands to include those in its operational change during the post-pandemic. 97% of staff belonging to such unions have rejected the company's offer of better pay and allowances (Whitley, 2022). Hence, it can be recommended that Qantas focus on and fulfill the demands of the associated unions in order to provide a better service to its global clients. Thus, such effective collaborations with the union members would support the airlines company to rescue the financial losses to some major extent.  

Enhanced Financial Planning 

During the post-pandemic, Qantas could not perform its financial planning to some desired margin, which affected the internal operations of the company to some noticeable margin. COVID-19 has affected most of the hospitality and airline businesses to some significant extent, from which most have recovered by focusing on innovative and creative approaches. Although Qantas has been focusing on reducing its operational costs by considering various methods and strategies, it could not recover from the financial losses caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Hence, it can be recommended that the company improve its financial planning by aligning its goals and objectives, which would help it to deal with the adverse situation of the COVID-19 pandemic and reduce operational costs. With adequate financial planning, Qantas would also be capable of delivering desired services to the global client base by fulfilling their demands as well as requirements appropriately. This would further help it follow the financial framework and maintain a balanced scorecard, which is some of the organization 's objectives. 

Innovation 

Lack of innovation also can be observed within the development of policies and determining the company's business functions. This has further affected the service qualities as well as the competitive advantages of the company. During the post-pandemic, other airline businesses have focused on innovative and creative approaches to determine their service qualities and achieve advantages in the market. According to Nolan (2022), the passengers of Qantas have been facing long flight delay issues due to some technical problems. The company still follows traditional operations methods; hence, the fast-paced market is producing significant challenges for the company. Hence, it can be recommended that Qantas follow both innovative and creative approaches in its operational planning, which would enhance the quality of the services and mitigate such issues faced by its passengers. The company can also consider technological innovation, which would support Qantas in making data-driven approaches to gaining the desired competitive advantages. This would also help the company deal with financial planning-related issues, as well as mitigating the financial gaps that occurred due to the adverse situations of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Enhancing the Service qualities

This is another alternative approach recommended for Qantas to meet its corporate objectives and its long-term and short-term goals. It was recommended as an alternative as it could provide certain competitive advantages to the airline company, which would further help Qantas generate desired profitability. According to Gans (2011), the company has been providing below-average domestic experiences to its global clients, which has contributed much to generating significant quality gaps within its services. Hence, this was presented as one of the alternatives to Qantas to focus on improving the service quality, which would further support the company in maintaining a balanced scorecard. This would also attract more consumers from the market that would further impact on the revenue generation of the company. Thus, the company can recover from its financial losses. 

Consequences 

5. Recommendations

This section will highlight the chosen alternatives among all four with proper justification for choosing that particularly. In addition, the even swap method will be utilized in order to select the most suitable solution for the customer by analyzing the performance of each of the potential options. 

Innovation 

Innovation has been chosen among all the alternatives, and this one is recommended to the client. There are multiple reasons to choose this one among the other alternatives discussed in the previous section of this report. During the post-pandemic, increased market competition can be observed within the hospitality as well as airline businesses globally (Amankwah-Amoah, 2021). Furthermore, adverse impacts of the pandemic compelled the governments to go through temporary lockdowns, which further affected the financial health of the companies to some noticeable margin. In order to deal with the issues, businesses belonging to the hospitality and airline sectors have been adopting innovative and creative methods to re-establish their brand images in the market and regain their competitive positions. This has helped them improve the service quality as well as company policies to operate the business functions. Hence, this particular alternative has been chosen to be the best one as a recommendation for Qantas as this would allow the company to go through major changes within its operations by introducing advanced technologies as well as innovative methods in improving the service qualities as well as delivery. This would also help Qantas follow its financial frameworks and maintain a balanced scorecard, which are some of its primary objectives. Thus, Qantas could mitigate its financial planning-related issues, which would help it further restore the financial damages caused by the global pandemic. Thus, this particular recommendation can support the company in mitigating the financial issues to some noticeable margin as this would allow Qantas to consider innovative approaches in performing its business operations. Therefore, it can reduce the operational costs as well as focusing on the development of effective financial planning. 

Trade Offs 

Even Swap

6. Risks, Uncertainties, and decisions associated with the chosen alternative

Although innovation can fetch multiple competitive advantages to the organisation , by which it can re-establish its brand image within the market, especially during the post-pandemic, innovation can bring certain risks as well as uncertainties (Yu et al., 2021). This can include a high operational cost for the company, which has been identified as a major risk for the company as Qantas has been focusing on reducing operational costs by taking the help of various strategies and methods. Thus, the company can find innovation costly to some extent, creating some points of concern for the company. Apart from this, innovation would require additional support from research and development on the functions of the airline industry in order to gather and evaluate data regarding the areas of development. This would draw the company's attention to other sectors, which can make the company's operations complex. 

7. Steps to implement the chosen alternative

Innovation can be introduced in different sectors of the airline company, which are elaborated on in the following. 

Network Operation 

Innovation in the network operation can support Qantas in improving the efficiency of its operational capabilities in airport traffic control. This would further add value to its network operations by enhancing the use of advanced materials, more sustainable fuel consumption, energy storage, and conversion into digital systems, as well as mitigating environmental factors (Rengarajan et al., 2021). 

Trajectory Management 

Innovation in this section would support Qantas in making a data-driven approach to fetching operational excellence to ensure the proper trajectory (Di Vaio & Varriale, 2019). This would also help the company mitigate long-haul passenger flight issues by ensuring operational excellence. 

Aircraft Separation Modes

This is the next step in implementing innovation that would allow the aircraft to enhance the efficiency of the aircraft separation (Koseoglu et al., 2019). The tower controller would also provide enhanced signals to the aircraft, which would further allow the pilots to handle the aircraft more efficiently. 

System-Wide Information Management (SWIM)

Innovation in this step would allow Qantas to take complete control of the flights by evaluating the current situation of the air quality, weather, flight information, as well as the demands of its stakeholders (Drljača et al., 2020). 

8. Conclusion

It can be concluded that Qantas should focus on innovation primarily, which would allow it to mitigate all the issues properly. On the other hand, the other alternatives would not be able to cover all the issues, although those are capable of mitigating some of the issues faced by Qantas. The steps for implementing innovation would allow the company to take complete control of the flights, which would further enable it to enhance the service qualities to some noticeable margin.

References

Amankwah-Amoah, J. (2021). COVID‐19 pandemic and innovation activities in the global airline industry: A review. Environment International, 156, 106719. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envint.2021.106719

Di Vaio, A., & Varriale, L. (2019). Blockchain technology in supply chain management for sustainable performance: Evidence from the airport industry. International Journal of Information Management. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2019.09.010

Drljača, M., Štimac, I., Bračić, M., & Petar, S. (2020). The Role and Influence of Industry 4.0. in Airport Operations in the Context of COVID-19. Sustainability, 12(24), 10614. https://doi.org/10.3390/su122410614

Gans, J. (2011, September 19). Qantas and the Airline Quality Gap. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2011/09/qantas-and-the-airline-quality

Heiets, I., & Prakittachakul, V. (2020). Optimizing the Marketing Strategies of Qantas Airways and Thai Airways. Transnational Marketing Journal, 8(1), 95–124. https://ideas.repec.org/a/mig/tmjrnl/v8y2020i1p95-124.html

Heiets, I., Oleshko, T., & Leshchinsky, O. (2021). Airline-within-Airline business model and strategy: case study of Qantas Group. Transportation Research Procedia, pp. 56, 96–109. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trpro.2021.09.012

Koseoglu, O., Keskin, B., & Ozorhon, B. (2019). Challenges and Enablers in BIM-Enabled Digital Transformation in Mega Projects: The Istanbul New Airport Project Case Study. Buildings, 9(5), 115. https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings9050115

Nolan, B. (2022). Qantas passengers were delayed on an airport runway for almost the length of their flight due to a technical glitch. Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/qantas-technical-glitch-delay-travel-choas-passengers-airport-runways-2022-8

Oxenbridge, S., Wallace, J., White, L., Tiernan, S., & Lansbury, R. (2010). A comparative analysis of restructuring employment relationships in Qantas and Aer Lingus: different routes, similar destinations. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 21(2), 180–196. https://doi.org/10.1080/09585190903509472

Raynes, C., & Tsui, K. W. H. (2018). Review of airline-within-airline strategy: Case studies of the Singapore airlines group and Qantas group. Case Studies on Transport Policy, 7(1). NCBI. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cstp.2018.12.008

Rengarajan, S., Moser, R., Tillessen, L., Narayanamurthy, G., & Reddy, S. S. J. (2021). Decision model innovation for competitive productivity (CP) in the airport industry. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, 33(9), 3021–3039. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijchm-09-2020-1041

White, L. (2018). Qantas still calls Australia home: The spirit of Australia and the flying kangaroo. Tourist Studies, 18(3), 261–274. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468797618785617

Whitley, A. (2022). Bloomberg - Are you a robot? Www.bloomberg.com. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-20/covid-stressed-qantas-tries-to-rip-up-crew-deal-after-talks-fail

Yu, M.-M., Abdul Rashid, A., & See, K. F. (2021). Developing an innovation capital index of global airlines using a hierarchical data envelopment analysis approach. Journal of the Operational Research Society, 73(8), 1708–1723. https://doi.org/10.1080/01605682.2021.1923378

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