The study focused on determining whether UK university athletic departments engaged in strategic planning. It also wanted to investigate the key areas of focus in strategic planning. The third objective was to analyze the relationship between university size and strategic planning as well as athletic director’s background and strategic planning.
In the article, the objectives were clearly outlined at the beginning of the paper. Additionally, the writer did a good job of defining key terms, such as strategic planning, its usefulness in organizations in general, and application in UK athletic departments. Furthermore, the author clearly defined his cut-off criteria for engagement in strategic planning. It was also laudable that the investigator sought participation from members of the British Universities Sports Association; this group is representative of most tertiary athletic programs in the UK. Questions asked in the survey were clear and devoid of any unnecessary complications. The author revisited his research hypotheses in the discussion section and gave recommendations on areas of future research, such as the extent to which certain factors cause resistance to strategic planning in university athletic departments.
One of the major weaknesses of the paper was that it relied on self-reported judgments of strategic planning. In other words, the research bases all its findings on the degree of honesty of the participants. It would have more insightful if the author used a source other than the subjects’ own opinions. One way of rectifying this problem would be to use a range of data collection strategies. For instance, the investigator should have used official documents as well as personal observation to support the findings in the survey questionnaires.
Some problems also exist in the way the survey questionnaire was designed. When investigating some of the factors that led to resistance to strategic planning, the author used a closed-ended questionnaire. This limited the respondents’ choices to the writer’s imagination. It is likely that other factors may have led to the development of resistance to strategic planning, but Kriemadis (2009) did not leave room for these facts. He should have included one open-ended question that would have solicited the respondents’ views on any other factors that led to strategic planning resistance. Other weaknesses included the lack of data presentation figures for his last two objectives. The author focused too much on establishing the extent to which strategic planning took place in universities and marginalized the issue of university size as well as director’s background. Furthermore, he did not highlight these results in the abstract.
The authors wanted to design a strategy for championship sports in an Iranian province called Zanjan. They collected data from a series of sources and then used them to assess the province’s status in strategy management. They also suggested some possible strategies for development of sport within the province.
The authors did a good job of getting several sports stakeholders to participate in their research. They also outlined their research findings using tables and statistical methods.
The research lacks cohesion as one cannot tell the difference between the first aspect of the research, which concerns assessment of the status of strategy formulation in the province and the second part, which recommends strategies for sports development. Secondly, the writers did not clearly define the terms that they would base their analysis on. They merely talked about SO, WT and ST strategies but did not say what these acronyms mean and how they relate to strategy formulation. One gets lost in the results section owing to this confusion. Additionally, the authors mixed up their research methods; they did not specify which data collection methods applied to status assessment and which ones related to strategy recommendations. Additionally, they seemed to have more than one main objective. In the abstract section, they talked about assessment of the sports strategy status of the province and strategy design. However, in the findings section, they define their general objective as promotion of championship sports in the province. Even the manner in which they framed this latter objective is questionable because it has no time limits and is difficult to measure.
In the discussion and conclusion section, the authors did not give a comprehensive or holistic view of their findings. Readers cannot relate what they found with their initial ideas. They should have tied their findings to their initial objectives. Furthermore, they should have discussed the usefulness of the report to sports stakeholders in the province. Overall, the ideas in the article are poorly expressed. This could stem from language difficulties, as the authors regard English as a second language. It would have been appropriate for the investigators to focus on one aspect of strategy formulation as this would have yielded a coherent paper.
References
Kriemadis, T. (2009). Strategic planning in university athletic departments in the United Kingdom. The Sport Journal, 12(2), 1.
Taghibigloo, N., Kohandel, M., Darbani, H. & Heidary, A. (2011). Strategies formulation for championship sports in Zanjan province. International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences, 1, 203-211.