NEW Summative Assessment Brief CW11- Management Essentials | BPP

General Assessment Guidance

• Your summative assessment for this module is made up of this coursework submission which accounts for 100% of the marks.
• Please note late submissions will not be marked.
• You are required to submit all elements of your assessment via Turnitin online access. Only submissions made via the specified mode will be accepted and hard copies or any other digital form of submissions (like via email or pen drive etc.) will not be accepted.
• For coursework, the submission word limit is 5000 words. You must comply with the word count guidelines. You may submit LESS than 5000 words but not more. Word Count guidelines can be found on your programme home page and the coursework submission page.
• Do not put your name or contact details anywhere on your submission. You should only put your student registration number (SRN) which will ensure your submission is recognised in the marking process.
• A total of 100 marks are available for this module assessment, and you are required to achieve minimum 50% to pass this module.
• You are required to use only Harvard Referencing System in your submission. Any content which is already published by other author(s) and is not referenced will be considered as a case of
  plagiarism.
• You can find further information on Harvard Referencing in the online library on the VLE. You can use the following link to access this information: http://bpp.libguides.com/Home/StudySupport 
• BPP University has a strict policy regarding authenticity of assessments. In proven instances of
  plagiarism or collusion, severe punishment will be imposed on offenders. You are advised to read the rules and regulations regarding plagiarism and collusion in the GARs and MOPP which are available on VLE in the Academic registry section.
• You should include a completed copy of the Assignment Cover sheet. Any submission without this completed Assignment Cover sheet may be considered invalid and not marked.

Assessment Brief

This module is assessed through one graded element worth 100%. You must achieve at least 50% to pass the module. For this assignment you will produce a Business Consultancy Report based on Microsoft, written in an academic style.

By completing this assessment, you will achieve the following learning outcomes (LOs):

LO1 – Critically assess management practice within organisations.
LO2 – Apply your understanding of management principles in relation to key business challenges. LO3 – Critically evaluate how management behaviours can promote organisational success.
LO4 – Defend skills required to be an effective manager in a given business context.

Assessment Scenario

Acting as a Business Consultant you are required to produce a business report for the senior management team at Microsoft Corporation (MSFT), by utilising the techniques and concepts you have covered in the module.

Microsoft

It is difficult to find a business template to compare to the success and sheer domination of Microsoft Corporation. Begun as a kind of small-time business by two college dropouts in New
Mexico in the late 1970s, the corporate reach of Microsoft, in part from its remarkably talented pool of computer wonks and in part from its savvy positioning of itself in the burgeoning
computer software market, has emerged as a model for the new age of global corporate success, controlling and directing a worldwide market for computer goods, software, and tech services that revolutionized both business and homes. That reach was unprecedented.
Microsoft Corporation occupies a particularly grand place within the popular culture of American business mythos. It is at its most fundamental level an American-based international conglomerate that since the mid-1970s has overseen the development, manufacture, and licensing of a wide
variety of cutting-edge goods and services related to computer programming. But it is so much more than that. It is one of the most successful American business enterprises of the past century. From modest beginnings to its current status, Microsoft is a giant within the computer software industry, employing tens of thousands of people worldwide and generating annual revenue of approximately
$211 billion in fiscal year 2023. Its stock alone has created more than 12,000 millionaires.

The company has survived court challenges to its supposed position as a monopoly while controlling the majority of the market for computer operating systems and for office software—at a staggering, indeed unprecedented level of international market control that reached 90 percent for years. It has seen success in other areas, including video games, its internet search engine, and digital services. Although the 2010s saw Microsoft's once near-total dominance diminish with the emergence of new computer technologies such as smartphones and tablets, the company remains a global phenomenon and the leading provider of desktop computer operating systems and office software.

Overview

The history of Microsoft has become the stuff of American business legend—in 1975, two savvy
amateur computer programmers, Bill Gates, and Paul Allen, recognized the potential of developing a universal programming language, dubbed BASIC, and together sold the idea to the manufacturers of a computer programming system already in production, Altair 880. Allen coined the name Microsoft by simply combining the terms microcomputer and software. But neither Gates nor Allen was  content—they recognized the potential for personal computer (PC) systems and, relocating to Washington state, began to develop in earnest computer software that would introduce the speed, efficiency, and organization potential of computerized data systems to both businesses and individual consumers. Over the next decade, Microsoft attracted some of the best and the brightest among a new generation of computer software engineers and quickly established a market presence for programs that were deemed cutting edge for introducing new tools for computer work that greatly enhanced the attractiveness of computer software.

In 1981, Microsoft firmly established its presence by negotiating a massive deal with IBM to produce the first operating system, called DOS (or disk operating system), for business data compilation and retrieval. It was a worldwide success, and two years later Microsoft introduced a similar computer software application designed for home use. In 1985, Microsoft ventures took off with the introduction of the first Microsoft Windows program that included word processing, cutting-edge spreadsheet capabilities, and what was considered massive database storage capability. Shortly after the introduction of Windows, Microsoft went public with its stock and nearly overnight became one of the leading giants in American business. Programs such as Microsoft Excel, Word, and Powerpoint , parts of the Microsoft Office software suite, would come to dominate business computing as well as home PC use. Over the next decade, Microsoft pioneered an increasingly sophisticated family of computer programming systems for both businesses and personal computers. By the mid-1990s, Microsoft Windows and its successive evolutions had become the most widely used operating systems in the world. Despite intense and often acrimonious court challenges by rival computer software corporation Apple that cited Microsoft as a monopoly and sought to break up the company in order to break its market dominance, Microsoft persisted. Even after being sued by the United States , the company used a variety of legal manoeuvring’s as well as a battery of high-priced legal counsellors to survive a nearly four-year court challenge (court rulings found Microsoft abusive in its market dominance but ultimately the company was not held to any significant dissolution proceedings) to remain the dominant computer software corporation in the world.

By the mid-1990s, visionary founder Bill Gates recognized the potential of the emerging reach of the Internet, and subsequently Microsoft began developing its own program software that would incorporate the convenience, the information, and the data reservoirs of the Internet. It is one of the few missteps in Microsoft’s business success that, despite a succession of Microsoft Windows programs that each vastly improved the efficiency and look of document preparation and data storage, that it grasped the import of the Internet relatively late, but Microsoft quickly established its presence by linking computer data processing to access to the Internet. It also expanded by taking over other companies, as in 1997 when it acquired Hotmail, a free email provider.
 
Microsoft also eventually developed a reach into the lucrative market of video gaming, then dominated by Nintendo and Sony, by developing the game console Xbox in 2001. Along with its successor the Xbox 360, introduced in 2005, the console took the game market by storm, selling more than 40 million units to outsell Sony’s perennial top seller PlayStation.

Microsoft successfully expanded into other areas as well, such as with its search engine, Bing, introduced in 2009 and its $8.5 billion acquisition of video chat company Skype in 2011. However, as the computing world shifted to mobile technologies in the late 2000s and 2010s, Microsoft's once seemingly impregnable hold over the market began to waver. Again, late to the game in the smartphone market and the tablet computer market (both dominated by rival Apple with its iPhone and iPad, respectively), Microsoft introduced its own Windows Phone OS and Surface tablets with less than dominant results. By 2014, by the company's own estimate, it controlled only 14 percent of the total market for operating systems across all potential devices, though it retained its 90 percent hold on the desktop PC market. 

In 2014 Steve Ballmer, who had replaced Gates as CEO in 2000, stepped down himself and was succeeded by Indian American executive Satya Nadella, who had previously led Microsoft's cloud and enterprise group. He continued the company's push into the burgeoning field of cloud computing, mainly through its Azure cloud computing service. This culminated in 2019 in Microsoft beating out Amazon to win a $10 billion cloud computing contract with the US Department of Defence, a project known as the Joint Enterprise Defence Infrastructure (JEDI). However, the following year, the company lost a bid for the US operations of the popular video-sharing app TikTok. At the same time, reports indicated that its Teams communications app had acquired an even larger number of users, and its cloud computing business had grown as more workers shifted to remote work during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. In March 2020, Gates announced his departure from Microsoft's board of directors, citing a desire to spend more time focusing on philanthropy.

In January 2022, Microsoft announced that it was in the process of acquiring video game publishing giant Activision Blizzard, known for video game franchises such as Call of Duty, and World of Warcraft, for an estimated $68.7 billion. The acquisition was completed in October 2023. The same year, Microsoft announced an investment deal with developer OpenAI. The company explored artificial intelligence (AI) in other ways as well, including with the 2023 release of Azure Quantum Elements, which includes a language model tool based on GTP-4 called Copilot, and investments into building AI centres around the world.

In July 2024, Microsoft machines crashed after a faulty update by CloudStrike cybersecurity. Less than two weeks later, a Microsoft outage was caused by a distributed denial of service cyberattack. The outage affected Microsoft 365 products used by airlines, banks, and medical services, among others, and lasted for almost ten hours.

Assessment Task

You are to critically evaluate the current management practices at Microsoft Corporation and recommend changes based on your evaluation that company must implement to improve its success in the technology sector.

Task 1 – Management Practices (LO1)

Conduct a comprehensive analysis of Microsoft’s management practices, describing its key aspect
and critically assess these management practices.
Support your arguments with reference to appropriate academic literature, case study materials and your independent research.

Task 2 – Analysis of Business Challenges (LO2)
Identify a significant business challenges faced by Microsoft. Apply relevant management principles to analyse how Microsoft addressed these challenges.
Support your arguments with reference to appropriate academic literature, case study materials and your independent research.

Task 3 – Impact of Management Behaviours on Organisational Performance (LO3)
Critically evaluate the potential impact of Microsoft’s managers behaviour on the overall organisation’s performance.
Support your arguments with reference to appropriate academic literature, case study materials and your independent research.

Task 4 – Management competencies development (LO4)
Critically assess different management competencies and defend why these skills are important for current and future managers at Microsoft to improve its success in the technology industry.

Support your arguments with reference to appropriate academic literature, case study materials and your independent research.