MBA 2391 Organisational Management and Control

MBA 2391 Organisational Management and Control

Course code: 
MBA 2391
Department: 
Accounting and Operations Management
Credits: 
4
Course coordinator: 
Hanno Roberts
Course name in Norwegian: 
Organisational Management and Control
Product category: 
Executive
Portfolio: 
MBA China
Semester: 
2026 Autumn
Active status: 
Active
Level of study: 
Master
Teaching language: 
English
Course type: 
One semester
Learning outcomes - Knowledge

Upon completion of this course, the student will be able to:

  • Analyze how alternative organizational design choices shape coordination, decision rights, and accountability in Chinese and international business contexts.
  • Evaluate how management control systems and performance measurement systems support, distort, or redirect strategic priorities during digital transformation.
  • Critique the fit between organizational structure, change approach, and control mechanisms, including trade offs between flexibility, control, and innovativeness.
Learning outcomes - Skills

Upon completion of this course, the student will be able to:

  • Diagnose an organizational and control problem in a real company situation, and translate the diagnosis into a coherent design and change proposal.
  • Design an actionable set of control approaches and performance mechanism that link strategy, operations, and cross-functional collaboration.
  • Build, test, and refine a Miro based AI enabled “Sidekick” that operationalizes the proposal into reusable managerial templates, decision aids, and visual logic maps.
General Competence

Upon completion of this course, the student will be able to:

  • Justify organizational and management control recommendations to stakeholders, using clear visual argumentation and documented evidence.
  • Demonstrate responsible AI-supported learning by documenting prompts, iterations, and human judgments, and by showing how AI-use improved thinking quality rather than replacing it.
Course content

The course is broken down into two elements, covered in the following order.

Organization theory and design

  • Types of organization design
  • Centralization, decentralization, specialization, and coordination mechanisms
  • Types and forms of organizational change
  • Implementing organizational change

Management control

  • Conventional management control, including responsibility centers, budgeting, and financial performance metrics
  • Performance measurement systems, including non financial metrics and their link to strategy and organization design

Two of the teaching hours are dedicated to CSR, ethics, social, and environmental issues.

Teaching and learning activities

The course is conducted as an intensive teaching module with four subsequent full days, a total of 32 hours, supported by structured preparation in pre-class group work and post-class project work. The course aims to provide immediate value by connecting concepts to participants’ work experience and by using learning by doing. The course follows Fink’s taxonomy through a progression from foundational concepts to application, integration across functions, reflective learning to learn, and practical capability building.

The course is based on Design Thinking and uses a “flipped classroom” model. Students prepare by means of short readings, videos, and guided, case-based pre-tasks. Class time is used for alignment of theory and tools by means of structured discussion, interpretation, and application through in-class mini-cases. 

It uses Miro as the learning platform throughout, emphasizing collaborative learning within case groups as well as for the course paper. The use of the Miro platform serves several purposes: (1) to promote conceptual thinking and the critical evaluation of causal relationships, i.e., how the multidisciplinary learning material is understood , (2) to introduce critical thinking by means of collaborative learning and peer-to-peer sense-making, i.e., educational value is created in the groupwork processes, (3) to overcome barriers of interpretation and language through visualisation, (4) to develop the insight that AI-augmented knowledge networks are the digital era's organisation design, i.e., to enhance students’ employability and career progression.

AI is used primarily for learning-to-learn. Students use Miro’s embedded AI to support sense making, structure arguments, test alternatives, and improve clarity of visual models. Students will be provided with a set of workflow documents that show how to use the AI tools on the Miro platform. Students will be required to obtain the Miro badge “essential skills” as part of the course pre-work and to have the appropriate skills to work on Miro visual collaboration platform.

AI use must be transparent and evidence-based through a sequential prompt log and iteration trail on the Miro board. Cognitive offloading, meaning unexamined AI output, copy-paste answers, or AI replacing the student’s reasoning, is treated as poor academic practice and will reduce grade quality. Candidates may be cold-called in class to verify authorship and reasoning.

Software tools
Software defined under the section "Teaching and learning activities".
Additional information

In all BI Executive courses and programmes, there is a mutual requirement for the students and the course responsible regarding the involvement of the student's experience in the planning and implementation of courses, modules and programmes. This means that the student has the right and duty to get involved with their own knowledge and practice relevance, through the active sharing of their relevant experience and knowledge.

The course is a part of a full MBA and examination in all courses in the MBA programme must be passed in order to obtain a certificate for the MBA degree.

Qualifications

Granted admission to the BI-Fudan programme. Please consult our student regulations.

Disclaimer
Changes in exam type can be made until the course starts. In addition, unforeseen events or external conditions may call for deviations in teaching and exams.​

Assessments
Assessments
Exam category: 
Submission
Form of assessment: 
Submission PDF
Weight: 
40
Grouping: 
Group (2 - 8)
Duration: 
7 Week(s)
Comment: 
Case group work, counts 40% of the total grade.
Exam code: 
MBA 23913
Grading scale: 
ECTS
Resit: 
Examination when next scheduled course
Exam category: 
Submission
Form of assessment: 
Submission PDF
Weight: 
60
Grouping: 
Group (2 - 8)
Duration: 
7 Week(s)
Comment: 
Final group-based course assignment, counts 60% of the total grade.
Exam code: 
MBA 23914
Grading scale: 
ECTS
Resit: 
Examination when next scheduled course
Type of Assessment: 
Ordinary examination
All exams must be passed to get a grade in this course.
Total weight: 
100
Sum workload: 
0

A course of 1 ECTS credit corresponds to a workload of 26-30 hours. Therefore a course of 4 ECTS credit corresponds to a workload of at least 110 hours.

Reading list