Applications Link in Week 7
Program Project
Program Project: General Company Description
As Dr. Craddock described in this week's audio segment, you will begin your Business Plan for a New Venture or Business Analysis (Due Diligence) Report. It is important to understand that the company you choose for this assignment will be the company that you will continue to analyze for each Program Project in the remaining core courses in this program, culminating in the completed analysis that you will finalize in the Capstone. Therefore, it is important to choose a company for which you can engage in a robust analysis (whether it is an existing company or one you would like to research in order to determine the feasibility of establishing yourself). In each course, you will fill in segments of the plan that relate to content covered in that specific course for the company you have chosen in this course.
The format of the Business Plan or Business Analysis Report is your decision, although you will be required to use APA style. You are encouraged to look at a variety of plans and determine a format that works best for you and your target audience.
Remember, as cautioned in this week's audio segment, no proprietary, confidential, or otherwise internal information relating to a company and its performance that is not publicly available should be used in your work. If the information is only available to senior executives or distributed to employees as confidential and for internal use only, it is NOT appropriate for inclusion in this project. However, you may use any information that is available on the Internet, reported by the media, or that qualifies as public knowledge.
You must change the name of the organization and generalize the location so that you do not explicitly identify the organization, if you choose a Business Analysis report. It is important that you redact any information that will lead a reader to easily identify the origination. You are required to change the name of the company in all materials (including drafts shared with peers) to protect the information. In some cases, you may elect to maintain confidentiality by removing key pieces of data that might give away the organization’s identity or inappropriately divulge proprietary details. You should work with your instructors when these situations occur.
You may not survey or systematically interview employees at a company. If at some point you wish to pursue interviews or surveys, you will need to follow the standard university procedures to obtain prior approval from the Walden University Institutional Review Board (IRB). Collecting data from human subjects without IRB approval can result in dismissal from the program. You will need to produce your recommendations based on analysis of documents or observations you are able to make. You will need to be careful that no proprietary, sensitive, or confidential information is disclosed in your report. You should find out about the organization’s policies on use of company resources (including email addresses, printing materials etc.) for individual projects. Many organizations have restrictions on use of company resources.

Note: Although most Business Plans or Business Analysis Reports begin with an Executive Summary, it is actually written last. After you have completed the full business plan you can go back to the beginning to summarize the salient points in order to provide an overview for the reader.
In this first section of the Business Plan or Business Analysis Plan, you are to complete a document that includes the following:
Background and Introduction. Two key pieces of information are expected in this section:
Providing a clear, succinct, and focused examination of the background of the project and your reasons for undertaking it.
Introduce the company highlighting the company’s legal form, purpose, and key issues
Next, create