Crescent Point Energy Corp. CASE STUDY

Crescent Point Energy Corp. CASE STUDY

 

As its name suggest, the Executive Summary should summarize the document’s contents.

While this may seem obvious, far too often an Executive Summary introduces a document

rather than summarizing it. To avoid this, it is imperative that you keep in mind that an

Executive Summary should stand on its own. Think of it as a thumbnail image on a website.

The goal in displaying a thumbnail is to reduce the download time or to allow you to see

multiple images simultaneously. If you like one of the images, you can click on it to see a

more detailed (i.e., higher resolution) version. The same goes for an Executive Summary. It

should provide a rough idea of the document’s contents but should save the details for

those who are sufficiently interested to read the entire document.

It is essential that an Executive Summary not be too long. Actual length often depends on

the length of the document being described. It also depends on professional norms. That

said, it would be unusual for an Executive Summary to be more than 10% of the entire

document. And more often than not, it would be closer to 5% of the overall length,

particularly when there is a word limit on the length of the overall document (as is the case

with your assignments).

 Introduction & Company Overview 5%

The Introduction & Company Overview should introduce the reader to the report. Since

your report is focused on a single organization, among other things, it should introduce that

organization. In the first two assignments, the organization will not need much of an

introduction since the marker will have read the case on which your assignment is based.

But in Assignment 3, you cannot assume that the marker knows anything at all about the

organization. For this reason, it is essential for you to provide sufficient context to make

sense of the subsequent sections. Toward this end, you may also need to introduce the

organization’s industry.

Author(s) of analytical documents often discuss the limitations of their report. This may

happen in a separate section toward the end, or even in the conclusion. However, because

you are not required to provide a conclusion to your report, you ought to discuss any

limitations in your Introduction & Company Overview. While you need not go into too much

detail, you should at least identify the sources or assumptions on which your report

depends. Additionally, you may wish to identify the sources or information that would

enable you to provide a more detailed or more confident analysis.

Mandate 10%

mandate describes why it exists, what it hopes to accomplish, and the limits

to what it will do. Every organization has a mandate and many make their mandate, or at

least a portion of it, explicit in the form of Mission Statements, Visions, Core Values, etc.

However, as you will learn, these public declarations often have more to do with window

dressing than guiding the organization’s actions. The publicly stated Mandate is not always

the same as the assumed mandate. It is important to recognize this distinction for it is the

latter that you are to provide in your assignments, not the former. your mandate should be divided into four elements. The first is theMission Statement or Core Purpose. The second is the Vision and/or Major Goals. Third isthe organization’s Core Values or, alternatively, its Guiding Principles. The final element isthe Stakeholder Analysis.

Each of the foregoing should be kept relatively brief—even briefer than they might be in

reality. So while some organizations might have lengthy Mission Statements, your Mission

Statement or Core Purpose should be no longer than a couple of sentences. The same is

true of the Vision and/or Major Goals. Ideally, an organization’s vision will be quite detailed.

However, you should need just a few sentences to convey your understanding of what the

organization hopes to be and/or accomplish in the long term. This also applies to the

organization’s Major Goals. If your organization has more than a handful, you need include

in your assignments only the five or six that convey the most important outcomes.

As with the other elements of the Mandate, the Core Values/Guiding Principles should

reflect your impressions of the organization’s core values. This is particularly important if

your organization has a Code of Conduct, which is often quite detailed. It’s up to you to

distill this code into a handful of values or principles that convey how this organization

expects its representatives to conduct themselves. Somewhere between five and ten values

or principles ought to suffice within the context of your assignments.

Stakeholder Analysis is the final element of the Mandate. A full-blown stakeholder analysis

can be a report unto itself. For your assignments, all that is required is a list of the most

important stakeholders and their most important implications for the organization you are

analyzing.

 External Analysis 15%

An External Analysis is a review of the organization’s industry, as well as the societal forces

that shape it. Usually, the objective of an external analysis is to identify an organization’s

opportunities and threats. When an organization can increase the size of its operations or

accrue more benefits from its existing operations,