MBA in Strategic Planning

Course details

The Edinburgh Business School MBA with a Specialism in Strategic Planning from Heriot-Watt University is designed for individuals wishing to gain advanced management skills and expertise. The MBA is a broad-based management degree and appeals to individuals from a wide range of backgrounds. The degree is aimed at people with experience who wish to develop themselves as effective managers. The programme includes the opportunity for students to extend their study to meet specific career requirements by taking one of the specialist awards. The specialisms provide students with a deeper understanding of the application of a specific discipline.

The programme offers general coverage of the key management disciplines – people skills, economics, marketing, accounting, finance, and project management. The capstone Strategic Planning course develops strategic thinking and the ability to recognise and use the various tools and techniques of the other core courses to identify and solve a wide range of business problems.

Programme Objective

• To understand the business environment and the influence of both consumers and micro and macro influences that shape the industry.
• To understand the role of different cultures in shaping national, regional and global business practice.
• To develop in graduates, both within the business curriculum and in the context of their degree programme, a range of transferable skills appropriate to employers needs.
• To develop analytical and evaluative skills.

Modules

1. Accounting: This module, which focuses on key developments in accounting including areas such as target costing, life-cycle costing and time-based activity costing, is aimed at sensitising students towards the changes in their organisations’ system.
2. Finance: This module aims at enhancing the students’ portfolio of financial concept and providing industry-specific examples. Through this module, students will be able to build their understanding of the underlying principles of finance and the application of tools of financial arithmetic when making financial decisions.
3. Marketing: This module encompasses topics such as marketing management process, corporate strategies, marketing implications, and business strategies. It provides in-depth marketing topics such as environmental analysis, industry analysis, competitive advantage, consumer and organisational buying behaviour, product life cycle and evaluating marketing performance.
4. Organizational Behaviour: This module clarifies how organisational behaviour (OB) and management are similar disciplines and also exposes students to the different ways to measure job satisfaction. It equips students with the knowledge of various organisational designs and new forms of service driven organisations, as well as organisational culture and change.
5. Strategic Planning: This module clarifies the meaning of strategic planning in business and explains how visioning can be applied to the complex strategy process. It also exposes to students why the understanding of the economy is important for managers.
6. Project Management: This module aims to familiarise students with the main concepts and the philosophies of project management. It also explores how project management may differ from traditional management, what the different organisational structures employed by companies are and what are the potential benefits and challenges of using a project management approach.
7. Econonmics: This module is aimed at equipping students with the knowledge of the main concepts in economics such as market demand and supply and the operation of markets, changes in market equilibrium, intervention and dynamic adjustments in the market and the concept of marginal analysis and opportunity cost. Students will also learn about fiscal and monetary policies in this module.

Electives

1. Corporate Governancve: This module is aimed at guiding students in distinguishing between internal and external corporate governance, and how economic development and corporate governance are interrelated. It also explains the foundations of the present system of corporate governance and how they have been developed. Students are also equipped with a better understanding of the driving forces that have shaped corporate governance reform efforts and learn about some of the leading codes of best practice today.
2. Mergers and Acquisitions: This module clarifies what a merger is, how it differs from an acquisition, and also what some of the explicit and implicit merger rationales are. Through this module, students would be equipped with the understanding of some of the basic measures of success for mergers, as well as the difference between long-term and short-term measures of success.
3. Making Strategies Work: This module helps students explore some of the key challenges facing senior managers seeking to execute strategy, and introduces a practical and rigorous process to drive from conceptual plans to the concrete actions with results. By being exposed to an in-depth case study based on real business situations, students are provided further insights into applications of these strategies.
4. Competitive Strategy: This module equips students with the ability to make strategic choices through looking at alternative directions and the means for pursuing these directions. In this module, students are exposed to competitive strategy in order to develop a set of analytical approaches and tools to help formulate and evaluate these strategies on a topic-by-topic basis.