Project 3 is upon me

Now that I am done with project 2, the marketing project, project 3 is upon me. Project 3 is all about finance and will be my biggest challenge yet. Math and I have not been friends since high school and I've waited for this project with great dread and apprehension.

Project three is called "Enterprise Performance: Comparative Company/Industry Analysis" and the name alone drives a shiver down my spine. I decided to write this post as a way to simply cover some of the things which are ahead of me in this project, and so I will briefly cover them below.

It seems that in this project I will stay away from ethics (project 1) just as I will stay away from marketing (project 2). In this project (project 3), I will stop looking at the organization from the outside and will shift my focus onto the inside of the firm by looking, and I'll quote from the project's description "at the firm's financial performance, its culture of efficiency and quality, its decision making, and developing new products".

Knowing this to be my biggest weakness, I want to spend the most time here. This is an area I need to understand and build knowledge around and so it will be difficult and painful, I also believe in self-fulfilling prophecies.

I do have an analytical frame of mind; I am a lover of technology but am also fond of verbal and written communications. This may seem a blessing but sometimes it does cause trouble when I overanalyze and become wordy at the same time, something you may have found to be true if you've spent any time on the site, reading my other postings, or this sentence.

This project's goals are quite hefty but at the same time I feel they are quite comprehensive. When I started the program and met my future professors, I thought project 3 would be as it seems to me now. And so I will briefly cover the project sequence goals below.

It states that once I have successfully completed the sequence of projects, I will have demonstrated my ability to do the following and as a caveat I want to say, I believe this will be the one project in the entire program I feel I will actually need to re-submit assignments because of a number of different reasons I feel will come to pass, without further ado I present you the goals I shall achieve at completion; copied directly without major modification.

• Conduct a comprehensive financial analysis for a company by completing both longitudinal and fundamental analysis of company financial information and performance.
  
• Evaluate financial data and make a decision based on financial forecasting and analysis.
  
• Understand performance measures that are derived from and support the company's strategy.
  
• Understand marketing and supply/value chain initiatives in the context of a market analysis for a new product or service.
  
• Conduct a detailed financial analysis of five companies in a particular industry, with further analysis on marketing and management for a comparative analysis of two competitors.
  

This is the basic outline of what I should be able to achieve once I am done with project 3. I will also write other posts which will go a bit deeper into each course module, precisely:

• Company Financial Analysis
  
• Financial Forecasting and Decision Making
  
• Balanced Scorecard
  
• The Industry Integrative Project