Group assignment

Group assignment You are ministerial advisor to Michaelia Cash, Federal Minister for Employment. The minister would like to know whether or not the country’s overall national thrust on Youth Unemployment is as good as it could be, and if not, how it might be improved. Minister Cash has many tools at her disposal to implement your proposals. The Federal Government could expend resources, either through her budget or that of another minister. Alternatively, it could use its power and influence to persuade state governments, corporations and not-for-profits to expend resources. The minister has suggested you consider the following five questions when constructing your answer: 1. Which of the current projects in the portfolio do you think are good projects? (You may wish to derive other criteria in addition to the ones we developed in class.) 2. How would you assess the portfolio in terms of its ability to deliver the government’s strategy with an appropriate level (and mix) of risk and reward? a. What do you think the (explicit or implicit) strategy is underlying the portfolio? That is, what problem is it designed to solve? b. Where would you place the projects on the McGrath and MacMillan matrix (or the appropriate equivalent that gives you useful insights)? What do you think about what you see? c. What are the implications of the core enhancements, new platforms, or options projects being wildly successful? 3. Now consider risk, reward, and performance a. How are they distributed on the matrix? b. How do you see the overall mix of risk and reward in the portfolio? c. Is the portfolio, as a whole, likely to deliver on the government’s objectives? 4. What sort of future does this portfolio create (in terms of capabilities, platforms etc.)? 5. How is your evaluation affected by alternative scenarios? a. What are the implicit assumptions about global variables (e.g. the health of the economy)? b. Do we need to consider other portfolios at the same time (e.g. health, disability services, environment)? Notes: 1. The data you have are incomplete, but that’s life. 2. You should constrain yourself to just the information in the database. You are free (and encouraged) to do additional research. However, please keep the following caveats in mind: a. Obviously, there are many more projects for Youth Unemployment in existence than the sixteen in the database. We have limited the portfolio to sixteen projects to keep the exercise tractable. Hopefully these sixteen are reasonably representative of the population. If you come across a class of projects we’ve missed, please let me know. b. Please don’t contact any of the organisations or projects directly. 3. Obviously, the sixteen projects don’t scale in a representative way. For example, the apprenticeship network represents many projects, while the “Young Harvest” project is one project that is representative of many. You should make appropriate assumptions if extrapolating from the sixteen. 4. It is possible to create new variables for each of the projects. So, if you think that a variable is missing (e.g. a particular aspect of performance), let me know and I can create it. You’ll then need to estimate its value.