Business Management: should I choose it?

The business idea

Internal business environment and planning

External business environment and planning

Legal requirements and financial considerations

Marketing a business

Staffing a business

Business foundations

This area sets up the vocabulary the rest of the course depends on. You learn the legal structures a business can take, from sole trader and partnership to private limited company, public listed company, social enterprise and government business enterprise, and why owners move between them. You then work through business objectives, including profit, market share, efficiency, effectiveness, meeting a market or social need and satisfying shareholder expectations, and the stakeholders who care about them: owners, managers, employees, customers, suppliers and the general community, whose interests routinely conflict. The management side covers the five management styles from autocratic to laissez-faire, the skills managers use to apply them, including communication, delegation, planning, leadership, decision-making and interpersonal skills, and corporate culture, split into the official culture a business publishes and the real culture its people live.

Human resource management

Human resource management is about the link between how employees are managed and whether the business meets its objectives. Three motivation theories are named in the study design and you need all of them: Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, Locke and Latham's Goal Setting Theory, and Lawrence and Nohria's Four Drive Theory, including where each is strong and where it falls short. Separately you learn motivation strategies such as performance-related pay, career advancement, investment in training and support versus sanction, plus on-the-job and off-the-job training and performance management through management by objectives, appraisals, self-evaluation and observation. The area finishes with the end of employment through retirement, redundancy, resignation and dismissal, with entitlement and transition considerations, and the workplace participants, including employer associations, unions and the Fair Work Commission, alongside awards, agreements, mediation and arbitration.

Operations management

Operations is the system that converts inputs into outputs, and the study design wants you to describe all three elements for a specific business and to see how the system differs between a manufacturer and a service provider. The strategies are worth learning as groups. Technology covers automated production lines, robotics, computer-aided design and manufacture, artificial intelligence and online service delivery. Materials management covers forecasting, a master production schedule, materials requirement planning and Just in Time. Quality covers quality control, quality assurance and Total Quality Management. Waste minimisation uses reduce, reuse and recycle alongside lean management's pull, one-piece flow, takt and zero defects. Corporate social responsibility runs across all of it, together with global considerations such as overseas sourcing, offshore manufacture and outsourcing.

Reviewing performance and the need for change

This area is about diagnosing a business before changing it. You start with proactive and reactive approaches to change, then work through the key performance indicators the study design names, including market share, net profit figures, productivity growth, rate of staff absenteeism, level of staff turnover, level of wastage, number of customer complaints, number of website hits, number of workplace accidents and sales figures, and what a movement in each one actually tells a manager. Lewin's Force Field Analysis provides the diagnostic tool itself: identifying driving and restraining forces, weighting and ranking them, then implementing and evaluating a response. Porter's Generic Strategies sit alongside it as the strategic choice, either a lower cost approach or differentiation, and you need to argue which suits a given business and why.

Implementing change

Once change is justified, this area covers making it happen. Management strategies for responding to key performance indicators and pursuing new opportunities include staff training and motivation, changing management style, investing in technology, improving quality, cutting costs, lean production, redeploying resources and global sourcing, and each has an indicator it plausibly improves. Corporate culture development strategies and Senge's Learning Organisation principles cover the softer side of change, while Lewin's Three-step Change Model gives you the sequence of unfreeze, change and refreeze. Resistance is handled through a clear split between low-risk strategies, namely communication, empowerment, support and incentives, and high-risk ones such as manipulation and threat. The area closes with the effect of change on each stakeholder group and the corporate social responsibility questions that follow, especially where employees lose work.

Planning a business (Unit 1 foundation content)

This is Unit 1 material: where business ideas come from and how they are tested before money is committed. It covers entrepreneurship and the sources of a business opportunity, developing a business concept and checking its feasibility, and the internal environment a founder controls, including business models, legal structure, resources, location and finance. Against that sits the external environment, split into operating factors such as customers, competitors and suppliers, and macro factors such as economic conditions, legislation, technology and social attitudes. SWOT analysis and the business plan pull the two together. None of this is new content in Units 3 and 4, but it is the reason the later course can assume you already know what a public listed company is, or why an external pressure forces a manager's hand.

Establishing a business (Unit 2 foundation content)

Unit 2 covers the period just after a business opens. You look at the legal requirements of establishment and the financial record-keeping that follows, then marketing through the 7Ps and market research, the product life cycle, and customer relations strategies for keeping buyers once you have them. The staffing side covers identifying staffing needs, recruitment and selection methods, and the legal obligations that attach to employing people, including the National Employment Standards. Much of this reappears in Units 3 and 4 wearing different clothes: selection feeds into human resource management, employment obligations resurface in awards, agreements and the role of the Fair Work Commission, and customer relations becomes a customer complaints indicator used to review performance.