The Order Doesn’t Matter and Quiet Teacher = No Complaints.

Resource Optimization – Week 2 Weekly Summary

It made me sad to type ‘Week 2′ in this post, I was thinking week 3 already!  That’s OK, the week went by without much trouble.  I stuck to the ‘1 hour per day minimum’ I mentioned in my previous post and that has helped me keep ahead on the work and relieve the constant feeling that I’ve always got something to do.  It shaves a lot of work off the weekend too, freeing up time to recuperate or wrap up any loose ends.

Week 2 was a team assignment week.  This is the first team assignment for this class, a benchmarking case.  The team is much bigger than my previous micro-team (see previous posts) and one of the current team members is stressed out over the benchmarking section appearing before the team synopsis/applicability to the scenario section.  Please people, can we focus on the content?

Actually, I understand her concern.  Her method has worked for her in the past, so she wants to use that formula again.  But what happens when other approaches have worked as well?  Should everyone else drop what they have experienced in favor of the squeaky wheel?  Probably not, but we may very well do that.  It just isn’t that important and if it makes one more person happy, so be it.

The discussion topics of the week involved discussing the pros and cons of financing working capital needs with short term debt and a hypothetical problem involving the two extremes all debt financing or all equity financing.  Not much excitement here, plenty of chatting in the class about pros and cons and personal experience.  The professor even posted a tangential question about health care.  She lead the post with “this is off topic, but…”.  I’ve noticed this professor doesn’t participate much in the discussion.  Maybe she’s still grading papers from her previous class, maybe this is just her style.  That’s OK, if she’s quiet she can’t be complaining!

If it is common sense, why doesn’t everyone do it?

Resource Optimization – Week 1 Weekly Summary

A brand new course, and a fresh approach.  The last couple classes I’ve been procrastinating more as the weeks go by, to the point where the deadline for an assignment became the ‘do on this day’ date for the task.  This course I’m trying a fresh approach with minimum time commitments per day, spreading the workload more evenly during the week, and freeing up more time on the weekend.  The theory is that every hour spent working on an assignment during the week is an hour not spent on it during the weekend.  That is just common sense, right?  Sure, but knowing it and doing it are two different things.

So a new class started this week, what is it about?  The ‘resource’ in Resource Optimization is about financial resources.  The optimization is about examining different approaches to allocating those resources.  The official description says that includes things like conducting business performance reviews, business process improvement, allocating resources based on market potential, and optimizing supply chain processes.  Of course, as with any college course, what the class is really about is up to the professor.

This week the discussion questions were “How does working capital policy impact the level of financial risk associated with an organization” and answering the question “Is it possible for an organization to be profitable and run out of cash?”  The homework followed the formula, do a concept worksheet.  My approach to the concept worksheets is to list the key concepts from the week, finding a quote in the text relevant to that concept, then finding an applicable portion of the scenario that relates to the concept.  This week the scenario was a simulation (just a different presentation of the typical scenario document in form of an interactive flash presentation).  The simulation was about a sports equipment manufacturer who had to balance payments to suppliers with payments received from retailers.

Overall a light week, week one usually is.  Teams were formed in a first-come-first-serve fashion.  Unlike my previous class this instructor had the wits to expand the existing teams when the last team came up short.  Bonus points for the teacher on that common sense move.  But like I said, just because it is common sense doesn’t mean everyone does it.
 

A definition of education

Maximizing Shareholder Wealth – Week 6 Weekly Summary

Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent.
- John Maynard Keynes

The focus of this week was appraising corporate perform using financial statements and ratio analysis, discounted cash flow techniques, and asset valuation models.  The discussion questions focused were to select and comment on three financial ratios that each student felt were most important and to examine the pre-merger financial statements of both companies in the scenario and to give a brief assessment of their financial health.

The homework this week was a large problem solution paper.  The topic was recommendations for the merger of the two companies who had been discussed in the scenario during the week.  These papers tend to run long, and I’ve struggled with the last couple.  I think I may have figured out why while working on this one.  The work isn’t bad, I do learn something out of it, but there is a lot of excess baggage.  All of the papers have to be written using a specific format with required sections.  Those sections aren’t always helpful in discussing the topic at hand.  The result is that many hours (problem solutions usually take about 8 to 9 hours to write) are spent working on a formulaic paper, with maybe one to two hours of actually learning something.

This is the conclusion of week 6, which means tonight is one of those Monday nights that only appear once ever six weeks.  Tonight I have no homework.

The Aliens have returned and this time they took someone for good

Maximizing Shareholder Wealth – Week 5 Weekly Summary

The focus of this week was supposed to be Weighted Average Cost of Capital, financing mixes that optimize capital structure, risks associated with investment decisions, and dividend policy.  The actual discussion questions focused on Modigliani-Miller’s theorem, which kicked up a bit of a discussion, and was more interesting to me personally than the WACC discussion.

The homework this week was the classic team benchmarking paper with an emphasis on financing options applicable to the scenario this week.  This was an interesting paper and our team was challenged by only having two people work on the paper.  Remember that team member whom I discussed possibly being abducted by Aliens?  Apparently the test results came back and the Aliens decided to take her to their home planet.  She hasn’t been seen in class since that week.  My remaining team member and I seemed to get into a rhythm though and I’m pleased with the result.
 

Twice as much daylight and twice as tired, how does that work?

Maximizing Shareholder Wealth – Week 4 Weekly Summary

Week four was my favorite of the weeks so far.  The topics were well related and relevant information was presented regarding each.  The three core areas of financial planning (assessing needs), Analyzing long-term financing instruments, and identifying medium-term financing alternatives all had strong relevance to the scenario and the homework for the week.  That homework, a gap analysis paper based on the scenario with the added information that one company in the scenario had decided to acquire another.

The discussion question on the relationship between financial planning and external funding requirements sparked some good discussion.  Having students with a broad mix of business experience added a lot to the discussion. 

There was also a discussion question on pros and cons of various long-term financing options as they apply to the.  Everyone seems to have heard of the various options discussed, so there was again plenty of discussion.

Getting motivated to do the homework has been a struggle.  Even in the middle of summer with the extra daylight the constant workload gets tiring and hard to focus on.  The gap analysis paper was lighter than the typical problem solution paper so I slogged through and sent it off on time.

Grades are coming in two weeks after the fact, as usual.  I’ve seen some surprising comments that make me wonder where the instructor is coming from.  Surprises are bad in the grading department, particularly when they come in two weeks later- it makes it hard to adjust.  It doesn’t matter much in this case, since I don’t know what I’d do differently.