Congratulations James!

James Nation

We have our first Otago MBA graduate of 2014!  As a little background, James is a former Olympian in NZ hockey and wanted to pursue a career in performance sports. He identified a client with a specialization in sports (software) technologies. His client had previously enjoyed a leadership position in this industry but had recently experienced growing competition. Rivals were catching up. James was charged with analysing the competitive landscape and identifying both strengths and weaknesses in his client's current product offerings (as well as opportunities). He was also asked to evaluate the professionalism of the company's management systems (and separability of the company from the owner) as part of formulating an exit strategy: an essential component of any entrepreneurial venture. James needed to interact with the scholarly entrepreneurship literature to identify "best practices" for a maturing venture.  James' project supervisor best describes the quality of his work:

"James has done an excellent job of this project for [his client].  The task was rather difficult given the two very distinct parts of the business that required separate analyses with respect to the market / competitors and an internal analysis of the professionalism of the company's management systems. James did a great job of splitting these parts more distinctly than staff / management were able to do, so this project is beneficial for the company.

James did a significant number of in-depth interviews with a range of internal and external experts, as well as analysed and presented their views well in his report.  From this, he was able to formulate a way forward for the company that meets the objectives of the owner who may want to exit the business in around five years.

The fact that James has been employed by the company attests to the excellent job he did in this project and from a supervisor's perspective, James was a good student.  We met weekly throughout the project, he took my feedback very well, and maintained the progress schedule we had compiled early in the project.  I cannot fault his management of the project in any way."

Congratulations James!

This project and James' management of the work involved constitutes a model for how

our BUSI 540 projects are intended to work.