Planning for the Chevy Volt Essay

What does the Chevy Volt case tell you about the nature of strategic decision making at a large complex organization like GM? From the Chevy Volt case, we can see that GM is a large complex organization and has a lot of processes to make any decision in changing their strategic plan. Moreover, they sticked to the past failure that they had experienced. Therefore, they moved too slow and missed the opportunity to change or adapt themselves to the external trend or a better opportunity. What trends in the external environment favored the pursuit of the Chevy Volt project? -Gas price was increasing sharply because of growing demand in developed countries including China and India -Global Warming become a significant concern so people trend to use the car which produce less Carbon Dioxide. -The cost of Manufacturing lithium ion batteries was falling and new technology make them more powerful -Demand for fuel efficient car like Prius (Toyota) that utilize new battery technology What impediments to pursuing this project do you think existed within GM? -GM already spent a huge investment in developing fuel cells -Many decision makers in GM didn’t want to suddenly switch gears and focus on lithium ion batteries instead -Technology in a large lithium ion battery production was difficult -Failure in the past was the experience that GM still remembered and was afraid to invest in new project What does this tell you about the nature of strategic plans? Chevy Volt project which is partly based on the assumption of fuels prices is rather skeptical. Plan outlay in context of rising oil prices, and environment sustainability only does not in a sense constitute total business plan layout. External environment analysis such as the macro and micro-economic factors also should have been focused, so that an alternative plan layout to develop new innovation for its benchmark cars model that run on fuel and that which should meet the tighter regulation in the future. How do falling oil prices affect the Chevy Volt project? The Chevy Volt project strategic plan was based on factor that kept rising oil prices in contention to market its electric car model for profitability. Falling oil prices can affect Chevy Volt project in terms of profitability directly from the sale of electric cars. Do you think oil prices will remain low? The demand for oil increases, prices also is also likely to surge accordingly. Besides there are no substitute product 5. What will it take for the Chevy Volt to be a successful car ? in light of your analysis, how risky do you think this venture is for GM? What are the costs of failure? What are the costs of not pursuing the project? I think it wills success for the following factors Its new models have cutting-edge designs that sell well, and its quality rankings and fuel economy rise, If every new model has dramatically better gas mileage in government testing than its predecessor, Proper advertising is done like GM products are appearing in hit movies, music videos, TV shows and other media. Cost of not pursuing the†¦