MG213 Class Week 04

Introducing the group project

Ask me two questions from
Monday’s lecture
 Group project

• A project on business model and systems

development
• Deadline
– Midday (UK time) Thursday 23 March 2023
(week 10)
• No presentation – just submit your report
– Any member of the group can upload the
document
 Required elements
• Business model summary
• Academic Grounding
• Requirements
• UML and Entity Relationship modelling
• User experience
• Conclusions and recommendations
 Marking summary
• Business model summary (10 marks)
• Academic Grounding (10 marks)
• Requirements (5 marks)
• UML and ER modelling (15 marks)
• User experience (15 marks)
• Conclusions and recommendations (15
marks)
• Overall quality (presentation) (15 marks)
• Overall coherence (15 marks)
 Contribution to course marks
• Project marked out of 100

• Group project (40% of marks for the

course)
• Individual reflections (10% of marks for
the course)
On the need to be clear about
the digital business strategy
 Your groups
• These will be shared in each class and the
complete list of all groups uploaded to
Moodle
 Basics of project work
• Read documents, summarise situation
with its objectives, requirements and
constraints
• Discuss and agree on the proposed digital
business strategy that the group is going
to follow
– What is the thing your group is going to focus
on?
– Not to be finalised this week
 Project is open-ended
• Different groups might focus on different
aspects of the food4all business
– Meal selection
– Order processing
– Usage prediction
– Assembly and distribution (logistics)
– Data analytics (e.g. customer feedback)
– Security and privacy
– Something really radical
 In your group
• Split and arrange the project scope into
individual tasks
• Assign tasks to team members and set
deadlines
• Join different parts together to see if they
fit
• Be prepared to redo any of the parts to
create a coherent end-product
• (Nominate a project coordinator/manager)
 Marking scheme
• Mark and feedback provided by the
course teachers
• All members of the group will be awarded
the same mark
• Marks will be allocated based on the
content of the report only
 Consider a group contract
• Formalize the expectations of group members.
– Group members’ names and contact information and
when you can meet in person / online
– Expectations (ground rules) regarding preparation for
and attendance at group meetings, frequency and
duration of meetings, and communication.
– Assignment of specific tasks, roles, and
responsibilities along with due dates.
– Processes for dealing with unmet expectations or
other problems that might arise.
– A method for peer feedback.
– https://uwaterloo.ca/centre-for-teaching-excellence/teaching-resources/teaching-tips/developing-
assignments/group-work/making-group-contracts
Practical lessons from last year’s
group projects
• Share files via a shared drive
– E.g.
https://info.lse.ac.uk/staff/divisions/dts/essenti
als/Get-started-on-OneDrive
• Finding a suitable time to meet can be
challenging but tools exist to help
– E.g When2Meet
Tactical lessons from last year’s
group projects
• Meetings in person are always better than
online only meetings

• Start early
 Initial steps: Brainstorming
• Explore the potential competitive forces
on the case
– (Porter)
 Porter’s five competitive forces
• CF1 – Threat of new entrants
• CF2 – Intensity of rivalry among existing
competitors
• CF3 – Pressures from substitute products
• CF4 – Bargaining power of buyers
• CF5 – Bargaining power of suppliers
• However, companies that use AI to
supplement their search results may find
any advantage shortlived.
• Google said last week that it would start
to include results from its own language
AI systems in its results “very soon”, and
that it would let users interact with the
new AI technology directly.
• That may make it hard for rivals to come
up with anything distinctive enough to
break Google’s grip on the market, said
Sterling. “If Bing integrates AI into search
in the same way Google does then we
might not see any change.”
• Yet even if the impact on competition
turns out to be muted, the broader
economic implications for the web still
look profound. For publishers who rely on
web traffic generated by search engines,
for instance, there is a risk that internet
users will find answers without needing to
click through to the underlying pages.
 Porter and case
• Can technology be used to build barriers
against new entrants (CF1)?

• Can technology change the basis of

competition (CF2)?

• Can technology be used to generate new

products (CF3)?
• Can technology be used to build in
switching costs (CF4)?

• Can technology change the balance of

power in supplier relationships (CF5)?
• How might you use technology to support
internal operations? To transform the
competitive marketplace?
Cash et al.
• In your groups, sort out group processes
(e.g. contact details)
• In your groups, see what ideas each
person has come up with

• Which ideas have general interest?

• Which ideas are worth exploring further?

No need to make decisions
now
(More strategy thinking next
week)
 Summary
• Introduced strategies for working in
groups

• Introduced your group members

• Initial brainstorming about possible

strategy ideas
 Class Week 5
• Bharadwaj, A., El Sawy, O. A., Pavlou, P.
A., and Venkatraman, N. (2013). Digital
Business Strategy: Toward a Next
Generation of Insights, MIS Quarterly
37(2), 471–482.
 For the case
• Come up with possible digital business
strategy ideas for the company under the
four themes identified in the paper
– Scope
– Scale
– Speed
– Sources of value
• One+ per theme
 Scope
• In what ways could food4all
– Transcend traditional functional and process
silos?
– Include digitization of products and services?
– Extend to dynamic ecosystems?
 Scale
• In what ways could food4all benefit from
– Rapidly scaling up / down as a capability?
– Network effects within platforms?
– Information abundance?
– Alliances and partnerships?
 Speed
• In what ways could food4all benefit from
speed of
– Decision making?
– Supply chain orchestration?
– Network formation and adaptation?
 Sources of value
• In what ways could food4all benefit from
– Increased value from information?
– Multisided business models?
– Coordinated business models in networks