Forums › ACCA Forums › ACCA SBL Strategic Business Leader Forums › *** ACCA P3 December 2016 Exam was.. Instant Poll and comments ***
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- December 9, 2016 at 8:14 am #362549
I hate this question. The scope is too narrow. There is 4 porter’s model, not even 1 come out.
Question 1 is not hard but i maybe missing mark on last subquestion where they ask for contribution of finance team. BCG, NPV and benefit analysis i do perfectly.
Option question I can’t do any of them perfectly. I did not study about time series analysis so I can’t answer it. Definitely regret not study it.
Question 3 is not too difficult, but its quite hard to apply the case. and what is principle of e-procurement? I didnt study that, and what i write is speed, linkage, easy, etc.
Question 4, erm i hate culture question but I have no choice and it’s kind of hard to explain why the dicrimental of staff motivation from culture perspective. 4(b) i don’t even know it exist in the syllabus. Just blabbering hoping to get 1-2 points.
December 9, 2016 at 12:08 pm #362607Question 1, PP co, was the Dog on BCG Matrix, I just wanted to point out that , whilst it was ok to say divest as future strategy, the Dog could contribute to economies of scale, and improving the synergistic element of an acquired company, seeing it was simlar industry to an existing entity in the MKI group. Another accusation of BCG is that it does not highlight profitability. Dogs can have low market shares but could be well profitable and contributing to shareholder wealth, hence acceptable by shareholders
You cannot throw away a Dog without as much as a thought π
December 9, 2016 at 2:31 pm #362646This was my 4th attempt in the last 12 months. Hopefully 4th time lucky. I don’t read the comments about the details of other students’ answers as I don’t need any more worries or frustration. It is all down to the marker and each individual response now. As they say, in P3 there is no right or wrong answer in terms of what you write as long as you can back it up.
I also found this paper a bit more difficult compared to September in terms of the topics. I would have passed in September if I hadn’t messed up because of time management issues. However, this time around I focused on my time management more and I ended up answering more, writing more, therefore I will have a higher chance of passing even thought it was still challenging, but overall an okayish paper.
December 9, 2016 at 2:56 pm #362658Ha, snap, I’m exactly on the same boat, if I got 10pts out of the 32pts in the second part of the first question I’ll be happy with that, I just hope I did enough in the rest of the questions to make up for it as this whole project question was a shamble
December 9, 2016 at 2:59 pm #362661Totally agree those 32 marks were nasty
December 9, 2016 at 3:41 pm #362673I said that Diagrama and what is this are starts as they have both “high maket share” and “high growth over years” and said that PP is a question mark as it has low on both. But suggested to keep in the portfolio because it serves both MKI and Diagrama
In analysing the three benefits of the appraisal, specifically in the increased sales, i stated the porters strategy clock to assess whether the increase will have the value NEEDED by customer and whether the right price is charged or not.
I stated that MKI is a ‘synergy manager’ as a portfolio strategic manager.
In Q2 i suggested that the time series analysis is good as a forecasting technique, but care should be taken to use the regression analysis, the time is not correlated and forecasting cannot be made using data of 2016 only. And the number of stores is not correlated either with increased sales.
December 9, 2016 at 4:31 pm #362695@ddmoo said:
What did people write for the what was missing from the PID question? I wrote:Risks not identified and analysed (use TARA)
No project sponsor listed
No measures given for how the objectives would be measuredNot sure if they were right.
I wrote no sponsor/project manager
No deadline
Constraints
I’m sure I put a few more in…December 9, 2016 at 4:43 pm #362704@feti7a said:
I said that Diagrama and what is this are starts as they have both “high maket share” and “high growth over years” and said that PP is a question mark as it has low on both.Low low is dog. Question mark is low market share and high market growth. Also I believe Diagrama had low market growth.
December 9, 2016 at 5:14 pm #362748General question : which is easier p1 or p3? As in which one can we study quickly ? Is p3 a little more conceptual than p1?
December 9, 2016 at 6:00 pm #362785@ddmoo said:
Low low is dog. Question mark is low market share and high market growth. Also I believe Diagrama had low market growth.Pp dog – analyse profitability and consider divesting if appropriate
Diagrama cash cow – milk
What’s this Star – investDecember 9, 2016 at 7:11 pm #362815hello can someone tell me whether we had to calculate the payback of the project also? please the part with npv
December 9, 2016 at 7:38 pm #362824I ran out of time and missed the 32 mark part of question 1. Not much hope of passing but at least I know for next time it’s all about time management with this one!
December 9, 2016 at 10:01 pm #362854For question one i said PP CO was a cash cow because the company had a large market share and the market did not grow. For the other two companies i mentioned Ashridge and how they are heartland businesses.
December 9, 2016 at 10:16 pm #362859For me, p1 is easier and more straightforward. it takes a lot longer to learn the models and apply them to the scenario for P3.
December 9, 2016 at 10:30 pm #362862@david0011 said:
For question one i said PP CO was a cash cow because the company had a large market share and the market did not grow. For the other two companies i mentioned Ashridge and how they are heartland businesses.I may be wrong but I wouldn’t say “What’s this?” would be a heartland business. I went with Value Trap as MKI could provide them with large benefits but wouldn’t really understand the mobile apps industry.
December 10, 2016 at 1:12 am #362892I wrote P3 in June, was horrible, I was surprised I even got 41.
I think the paper was fair. I didn’t have enough time to read due to work pressures but lucky that the topics I read and practiced a lot of questions on came out like the Cultural web which was 15marks, Linear regression and trend analysis also 15 marks.
Question 1a was quite okay though I spent a lot of time on it and it was 18 marks.
Question 1b the NPV I messed that up that’s some 9 marks lost, but for the Project initiation document, I wrote no project title, no start and end date, objectives should be short and concise, no project sponsor, manager, no business case, no evaluation of if a an off the shelf or bespoke should be used, no proper analysis of constraints etc, figured I had to get the full marks here. The last part of Question 1, was a bit hazy from the 8 marks maybe I will scale through with 4 marks just wrote down a few points.
Hoping to pass and not fail the second time. Jan 16th is even to far for me, wish I could get the result this month
December 10, 2016 at 6:03 am #362947Hi!
What did you write about NPV and payback question?
I only calculate the NPV – nevermind that I put 250 of P0 as a pisitive cash flow due to hurrying up and not looking. I calculated in the payback but not put any comments about discount factor and pros and cons of the methods.
December 10, 2016 at 9:59 pm #363166so were we asked to calculate the payback period?
December 10, 2016 at 10:34 pm #363169Not sure what to expect 16th of January. I hope it’s a pass.
Very lengthy paper and difficult. Could be approached with many different models.As for the investment appraisal question, I analyzed it both NPV & payback period.
There was a similar investment appraisal past paper question……otherwise I would mess up ? Lol
I chose to do q2 because of the standardized marks of the exercise
Q4 would require lots of blah blah and because of the time pressure it means that I would write rubbish.December 11, 2016 at 10:23 am #363222I was pretty much confused about the exam. I answered 1.a, 1.b.ii, 3.a & 4.a. quiet good. These 4 consists of 53 marks and answered other 22 marks.
Wheather i am gonna pass or again cought out !!!
December 12, 2016 at 1:30 am #363322@ddmoo said:
I may be wrong but I wouldn’t say “What’s this?” would be a heartland business. I went with Value Trap as MKI could provide them with large benefits but wouldn’t really understand the mobile apps industry.I think what’s this is a heartland business iit was benefiting from MKI’s help and profitability was increasing. If it was value trap MKI would be destroying value.
December 12, 2016 at 10:48 am #363423@joashbill said:
so were we asked to calculate the payback period?We were told to use appropriate appraisal techniques. With the information we had payback and NPV were the obvious ones but if you came up with something else I’m sure you’d get marks for it.
December 12, 2016 at 11:58 am #363443Anyone worked out the npv as the first two lines of benefits were observable and measurable so ended with negative npv so did not approve project. Did anyone get same
December 12, 2016 at 2:32 pm #363457I approved the project as it had an NPV oof positive at end of year four
December 13, 2016 at 10:05 am #363534Can someone kindly remind of how the marks were allocated in question 1? cant remember I think question 1 was an 18 mark one and whats the rest to make 50? kindly advise
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