ICAB AL Strategic Business Management study plan

Map the external environment toolkit (PESTLE, Porter's Five Forces, strategic groups, industry life cycle) and write a one-page summary of when each tool misleads

Apply PESTLE and Five Forces to two contrasting industries drawn from your own sector knowledge, scoring each force and justifying the score in two sentences

Build a stakeholder power-interest grid for one of those industries and identify which external shifts would reorder it

Draft a 10-item glossary of macro-environment terms you cannot yet define from memory

Explain how external analysis feeds SWOT and TOWS, and convert five external findings into paired strategic options

Compare growth, stability, retrenchment and combination directions, stating two conditions under which each fails

Apply the Ansoff matrix to generate four options for a single organisation and rank them by feasibility

Practise writing option appraisals in the SAF (suitability, acceptability, feasibility) structure

Distinguish resources, competences and core competences, and test three candidate competences against the VRIO criteria

Apply the value chain to identify which primary and support activities carry the organisation's cost and differentiation advantage

Diagnose capability gaps using a threshold-versus-capability comparison and propose how each gap could be closed

Assess how benchmarking and the resource-based view would rank the same firm differently

Evaluate strategic options using expected value, decision trees and sensitivity analysis on a simple numerical case

Debate the shareholder versus stakeholder purpose question and apply it to one contested corporate decision

Map the main corporate governance codes' expectations for board composition, independence and committees

Analyse a governance failure narrative and attribute causes to board structure, incentives and disclosure

Classify change by type and pace, and match each type to an appropriate implementation approach

Diagnose likely sources of resistance in a named change programme using a cultural web or force-field analysis

Sequence an implementation plan covering structure, systems, people and culture levers

Explain how organisational design choices (functional, divisional, matrix, network) trade control against responsiveness

Build a risk register with likelihood, impact, owner and response for eight risks across strategic, operational, financial and compliance categories

Evaluate internal control components and identify two control weaknesses in a described scenario

Select financial and non-financial performance measures for a named strategy and justify each against the critical success factors

Critique the balanced scorecard and the performance pyramid for a specific organisational context

Interpret a small set of KPIs and explain how management information quality affects decisions

Distinguish digitisation, digitalisation and digital transformation with an example of each

Apply a business model canvas to an incumbent firm and to a digital challenger, then identify the points of disruption

Assess how platform, subscription and freemium models change cost structure and risk profile

Evaluate the innovation portfolio of a named firm using the innovation ambition matrix

Synthesise the eight domains into a single integrated case analysis under timed conditions

Practise exam technique on three past-style questions, allocating time by domain weighting

Consolidate weak areas identified from a self-marked mock and rewrite two model answers

Review all deliverables and build a one-page revision sheet of frameworks and their limitations