Five weeks down, one to go.

Managerial Decision Making – Week 5 – Weekly Summary

This week had a couple twists on the usual weekly formula.  Beginning with the discussion questions, usually three are posted and each must be answered by a specific day.  This time five were posted but only two were required with doing more counting for ‘extra credit’.  The homework this week was another problem set rather than a paper.  The problem set didn’t have a ton of questions, but each took up to an hour to complete so the number of hours on the task were about the same as writing a paper (maybe a little less).  The usual online practice questions were required as well as the weekly participation requirement.

The topic was linear regression analysis, multiple regression analysis, and using correlation in making decisions.  The method of learning this through doing sample problems has the negative side effect of having the exercises turn into plug and play math problems without much thought about why the problems are being done.  Combining that with the week ending on Memorial Day weekend made for low retention of the content.

Next week is a team paper week.  This is the sketchiest of assignments so far.  A problem solution paper is the foundation, but since each team chose a topic there is no common baseline to start from as would be the case if we were working from a scenario. 

Back on Familiar Ground

Managerial Decision Making – Week 4 – Weekly Summary

The work this week returned to familiar territory with the big assignment being a problem solution paper.  A common assignment in other classes, this works out to about 30 pages of analysis on the scenario we’ve been discussing in class.  The research, composition, and formatting usually work out to about 8.5 hours of work.  Doing a paper of this type for a class that has been largely about crunching numbers is a bit like having ‘write a novel’ as an assignment for algebra class. 

Getting started with research for the paper was a problem.  The idea is to find real world companies that have encountered similar issues as the scenario in the class.  Then use the knowledge gained in class, supported by the research of real companies, to make recommendations for the company in the scenario.  The research problem arises when trying to respond to a grading rubric that has line items like “demonstrate application of a normal distribution in decision making”.  I recall mentioning the problem this raises in a previous post.  A lot of companies may do it, but they don’t tend to have articles written about it. 

So I took a different approach and researched banking issues (since the company in the scenario was a bank).  Then I tied the issues being faced by banks to the problems in the scenario, mainly in the area of selecting which product from several should be brought out by the bank, and discussing the methods banks can use to select those products.

Reading back over that it all sounds very dry, and it was.  When it came time to submit the paper I was down to the wire, but I got it turned in on the due date.  Work for this week also included more online math problems and the usual discussion questions and participation in class (commenting on other student’s discussion questions).

Around the turn, it’s Gift Horse in the lead!

Managerial Decision Making – Week 3 – Weekly Summary

This week started with two clear warnings from the professor; the workload would be increasing.  Unfortunately, a perfect storm developed when my day job got very busy and some additional work was required that had to be performed after business hours.  That meant my day was filled with activity, and when I would normally go home to do house and school work, I had to start the extended work.  So school got pushed back to 9PM most nights.  There was little chance to take action on the professor’s warning so I simply had to ride the storm out.  With a little luck and patience I was able to get each assignment submitted on time.  The last one ran down to the wire, it was supposed to be finished by Midnight and I wrapped it up around 5 minutes to 11.

So what is all this homework about?  For the most part it is about applying inferential statistics to business problems.  A good example is a scenario where you sell televisions and have some good records about how old TVs are when they are returned for repairs.  You want to offer a warranty on the TVs, but want to be sure that the warranty covers about 10% of the TVs that need repairs.  Inferential statistics includes methods for calculating how long your warranty should be to cover about 10% of the TV repairs.  Why 10%?  No specific reason, 10% is just an example.  The reality is warranties are probably set based on how much of the repair cost can be included in the price of the TV.  Everyone who buys a TV pays a small portion of the repair bill for those 10% that get returned in the warranty period.  Have you ever noticed how prices for electronics decrease over time?  Part of that can be explained by the manufacturer guessing at what the warranty period should be and guessing at how many TVs will sell.  If you sell more TVs than expected and find out not many are being returned for repairs, you can lower the price of the TV because you don’t have expenses covering the warranties.  However, if a TV is popular, don’t expect the manufacturer to rush out and lower the price- high demand also keeps the price up.

This week also included an odd little task, another Team assignment.  This time the goal was to provide the professor with a description of what we intended to do in week 6 to satisfy the requirement for a business problem paper.  The team tossed around ideas and I thought we had a line on something- not fabulous but viable.  Then one of the students chimed in with a completely different suggestion.  I wasn’t excited about the topic, but he took the initiative to prepare pretty much everything the team needed to satisfy the requirement for this week.  We exchanged a few dialogs about it, edited the idea he had come up with, and ended up deciding to not look a gift horse in the mouth.

If the professor accepts the proposal we’ll have to run this horse in week 6.

Calculating a Catch-22

Managerial Decision Making – Week 2 – Weekly Summary

I ended my last post with “Onward with the math…”, I had no idea how appropriate that would turn out to be.  Week 2 of this class saw the onset of more math work and less writing, particularly in comparison to every other class.  I was curious about the numbering scheme to the classes I was taking.  The numbers of each course were incrementing (as expected) but this class the course number dropped way down.  I’m suspicious that too many students were hitting this class early and bailing out of the program, so the school decided to reorder the classes, moving this one to later in the program so students had more invested before making a cut and run decision.

The topic of the week was analyzing data using descriptive statistics and applying basic probability concepts to facilitate business decision making.  Other topics were distinguishing discrete and continuous probability distributions and applying normal distributions in, yep- you guessed it- decision making.

Week 2 was also a team assignment week.  It was my first team assignment with this group, no one from the group I was working with in previous classes is in this class.  My previous team has established a pretty good working rhythm and I was concerned about how things would work out with the new group.  Ultimately it did work out, but to say it was smooth would be an exaggeration.  The assignment didn’t follow the formula of previous classes, which had a benchmarking paper assigned in this spot on the Syllabus, so any planning and proven strategy was out the window. 

The team assignment and ALEKS (online math problems) made up most of the work.  Focusing on reading the text book is a problem since it is hard to focus while knowing there is a lot of outstanding work to do that has a due date.  It’s a Catch-22 situation, you have to read the book to understand the work, but it is hard to focus on reading when worried about not having enough time to do the work.

Plug that into your calculator and see what comes out…