Business Management (Specialised Short Course)

Overview

Business management is central to how organisations are managed to fulfil entrepreneurial, social and broader stakeholder responsibilities.  Globally organisations are encountering disruptions and transformation mainly driven by technological advances that are associated with the Fourth Industrial Revolution or Industry 4.0. This needs to be dealt with by effective and efficient managers exposed to and appropriately skilled to operate in today’s dynamic economic environment. Organisations must be guided by emergent strategy and able to adapt faster, while being more agile to cope with the chaordic dispensation. Many problems encountered by entities reside in the functional areas of management, inter alia, the core functions of financial management, marketing management, and production/operations management. This specialised short course in Business Management sets the scene for people in managerial positions, or aspiring managers, to obtain the necessary knowledge and skills to be able to manage their organisations successfully during this era of rapid transformation and change.

Learning Outcomes

After completing this specialised short course, you will be able to:

• Recognise the impact of the changing business environment on all forms of entities. The business environment’s influence on organisations is described and practically illustrated.
• Explain the current management practices that are needed to commit the entity to a journey of re-invention in areas such as the appointment of staff, organisational planning, and strategy formulation.
• Understand the move away from bureaucracy towards leadership and management practices resulting in operational improvements and greater customer satisfaction.
• Discuss the management functions of planning, organising, implementation, and control that are needed to ensure that value is unlocked for the organisation and its stakeholders.
• Analyse and reflect on the use of marketing to interact with the customers and potential customers of the entity to ensure that its value proposition is communicated and understood by the target market.
• Identify the elements of the marketing mix and to develop a dedicated marketing mix for a Business to Business (B2B) or Business to Customer (B2C) entity.
• Evaluate the risk of doing business by using a quantitative and qualitative assessment of operations and financial indicators.
• Analyse and reflect on the use of budgets and the analysis of financial statements.
• Assess the resilience of the organisation’s business model by mitigating the unwanted risks in the business environment.