Description is about finding information on the company; For the environmental analysis you may wish to use the PEST-L and Five Forces Framework but undertaking these is not the same as analysis. A list of PEST-L factors is just that – a list. A Five Forces is too often nothing more than a mechanical and simplistic run through the model. What you will need to do for the PEST-L is to identify from your list the key factors and the inter-connections between them. From this you can then determine which are general and apply to the industry as a whole, which apply to specific sectors of the industry and which relate directly to your chosen organisation. You can then determine which are likely to be of a transient nature and those which you consider to be a permanent feature of the environment from this point onwards, and whether they are likely to intensify and thus their impact will become more severe. Similarly the Five Forces Model, when used creatively, can be of real help. You must at all costs avoid using the model mechanistically and instead should try to think about the various forces in terms of a time-frame of years rather than now. Obviously the current situation is the starting point but you need to consider the intensity of the forces and whether some are of long-standing or fairly new. You then need to think of what this means in relation to competitive rivalry within the industry of your chosen company or organisation. All of this should help you to construct an argument about what is happening and why. You can then turn your attention to determining the strategy that you believe the firm is following. You should now be making solid progress on your project and those who have not are leaving it far too late. You should be thinking of the structure and layout of your submission. The aim is to produce a strategic analysis of your chosen company that is no more than 4000 words in length. We cannot give a definitive or model structure since much will depend on the strategic issues that your research has uncovered. Nevertheless, there are some useful pointers that may help. As a general rule your introduction should account for 10% of the word allocation . This leaves some 3200 words for your analysis. Your introduction should introduce the organisation to the reader, possibly saying something about its origins, development and current size, explains what it does and sets out what your report will do. . Far better to discern from the history some route to the key strategic issues that the organisations faces today. Whatever aspects of strategy feature prominently you might wish to follow your introduction by giving some sort of overview of the organisation’s environment. This must on no account be solely descriptive. You should use ideas (models/theory) from strategy to identify the really important issues, comment on their origins and/or inter-connections and then give an evaluation of their significance to the organisation from a strategy perspective. You may even tease out at this stage the significant strategy issue that the company is having to deal with that will form a separate section later in your report. Certainly you will need to determine how many words you can safely devote to the analysis of the environment. It would be difficult to justify much more than 15% of the total word allocation, so you will need to structure the section with care and use words sparingly. Once you have done this you can then move on to say something about the organisation’s current generic strategy and the strategy direction that it is (or thinks that is) pursuing. You may be able to discern this from company sources and newspapers but you should try and give some sort of critical evaluation of them. Maybe the strategic direction is labelled as related but is not as closely related to the existing business as is commonly believed. From your analysis of strategy and strategic direction you might wish to say something about the organisation’s strategic strengths and weaknesses. Here again this could make a discrete section of your report but you should at all costs avoid lists, and use of bullet points. Most organisations are lucky to posses 3 or 4 strategic strengths, many have a similar number of weakness. Any organisation with more than 4 strategic weaknesses is unlikely to be able to survive. Put them in order of significance and discuss them. Can you relate the organisation’s strengths to its strategies and strategic success? If the organisation is relatively unsuccessful is the explanation found in the strategic weaknesses?