8. Long Term Decision Making Flashcards
What are the 7 typical stages of project appraisal?
- Identify range of potential projects
- Initial screening tests
- Detailed project analysis
- Go/No Go Decision
- Project Implementation
- Project Controls
- Post Completion Audit
What is soft capital rationing?
When capital budgets are limited for internal reasons
What is hard capital rationing?
When capital budgets are limited for external reasons - no stakeholder is prepared to invest more
What are the 5 general phases of a project in which controls are defined?
- The defining phase
- The planning phase
- The implementing phase
- The controlling phase
- The completing phase
What is a post completion audit?
An objective independent assessment of the success of a capital project in relation to plan, giving feedback that is useful for future projects
What are the 3 key benefits of post completion audits?
- May be time to implement changes for this project
- Holds managers accountable and encourages careful decisions in the first place
- Highlights weaknesses and high calibre personnel
What are the 3 difficulties with post completion audits?
- May stifle creativity by making management cautious
- Can be expensive
- Difficult to assess intangible costs and benefits
What are 6 costs of high quality data?
- Direct data capture
- Processing costs
- Database costs
- Cost of personnel and systems
- Data and system security costs
- Subscriptions to external sources of data
What are 4 key benefits to high quality data?
- Confidence in data for decision making
- Better understanding in external environment
- Less time spent reconciling costs
- Improved customer satisfaction
What are 4 common problems with data quality?
- Difficult to collate and analyse huge volumes
- Variety of data sources hard to make connections
- Data might be duplicate or out of date
- Data security and compliance becomes important
What are Business Intelligence Systems? (BIS)
The technology, methods and applications used for the integration and presentation of business information
How do you create BIS? (3)
- Define roles in the organisation
- Discuss and define what information is needed
- Design and build the system to create the reports
What 4 things make successful BIS?
- High quality data
- Regularly evaluating and adjusting targets
- Senior management involvement in culture
- Discussion of negative and position performance
What are the 4 main ways that BIS can help identify new business opportunities and reduce costs?
- Providing the right information at the right time to the right people to make better business decisions
- Enabling employees to use information to focus on process improvement
- Helps closer tracking of competitors
- Creates insights from complex data
What is a data lake?
A repository that stores data from all sources, with no processing or organisation, to be used for ad hoc analysis
What is a data warehouse?
A repository that orders and archives only specific data in defined ways, designed specifically for reporting
What is more secure - a data lake or data warehouse?
A data warehouse
What are the 3 categories of relevant project cash costs?
- Infrastructure
- Marketing
- Human resource development
What are the 3 categories of relevant project cash benefits?
- Direct cash flow benefits (e.g. incr sales)
- Incremental effects on other activities
- Residual values
What are 3 possible non financial benefits from projects?
- Better customer satisfaction
- Better staff morale (better assets)
- Better decision making (better systems)