Eight More Months, One Week at a Time

Resource Optimization – Week 6 Weekly Summary

Week six is the big problem solution week and course wrap-up.  The simulation material was pretty familiar by now since it has been used as a reference point for the last half of the course.  Since this class also had a problem statement preparation in Week 4 there was some information that could be carried into the final problem solution.

The topics of the week were developing a plan to optimize a supply chain and developing metrics to measure supply chain performance.  These concepts aren’t really new material; they’re more generalized forms of concepts that have been discussed throughout the course.  That may be why there was no new reading material for this week.  The discussion questions this week were recap questions, discussing what class topics were most useful and what people would like to see changed in the course.

I was able to commit more time in the evening during the week to class in hopes of freeing up weekend time and it worked.  I was able to spend Sunday doing other things, a rarity since I started the graduate program.  Saturday was a bit rough, I was making good progress but at one point hit a wall.  Apparently I hit it with my head, because I got a horrible headache and my work eventually ground to a halt.  I finally just quit trying and stepped away from the computer for a bit.  It must have worked because I was able to come back later and finish the paper with some decent writing.

Tomorrow it all starts over again with a new class. 

Is this an MBA class or a cocktail party?

Resource Optimization – Week 5 Weekly Summary

Week five and the return of a team paper.  Weeks 2 and 5 are typically team paper assignments.  I’m not a fan of these weeks simply because everybody has a different idea of what the requirement is and how to approach the issue.  Fair enough, but in a typical week I only have to keep one person happy, the professor.  On team assignment weeks I have to keep the team happy too.  For most people, this isn’t a problem.  The few remaining ones…well, did I mention this isn’t my favorite week?   

Each person in the class is assigned to a team, so the teams are typically four or five people.  Each team assignment has a rubric that highlights four or five core concepts from the course for the current week.  So each person tries to focus on one of those core concepts.  Each person then finds two companies to ‘benchmark’, a.k.a research and relate to the company in the scenario or simulation.  Everyone then goes about their merry way, doing their research and returning to the team room to insert their parts into a single paper.

While all this is going on the normal work week continues, with discussion questions and people commenting on one another’s responses.  This week the discussion questions focused on the current oil drilling issue in Venezuela (with a focus on supply-chain and international business related issues) and a strange discussion question that was a flashback to week 3, asking what some of the recommendations each person had made were and how each person proposed to implement their solution.  This professor also likes to drop random news stories into the discussion mix and asks students to comment, with outsourcing to China and the iPhone being two recent examples.

The commenting on discussion question responses is some of the most polite dialog you will find this side of a cocktail party.  Seriously.  There isn’t much challenging of another person’s response.  Occasionally someone will get something completely backwards, which is nice because a friendly comment to them in the form of ‘I was under the impression…’ will get both participation and substantial content points without upsetting the congenial nature of the conversation.  It is always done in a polite and non-challenging way.  I’m not opposed to this approach, polite conversation with some actual content is a rarity in the world these days.  However, after a week of polite comments about the oil situation in Venezuela and I get tired of talking about it. 

The side topics also can rattle on and on.  It was interesting to note that out of a class of about 25 people, no one has an iPhone and no one has plans of buying one.  These are people from all over the country working for various companies, everyone with at least a bachelor’s degree and currently gainfully employed- yet nobody has or wants an iPhone.  How did Apple skip over this entire segment of the population?  Now that would be a good discussion question.

Plow the right field if you want to get the crop in by midnight

Resource Optimization – Week 4 Weekly Summary

Pretty much every class follows the same pattern, except for Week 4.  In some classes this week has a Gap Analysis assignment.  Other classes use this week as a Problem Statement preparation week.  The advantage of the Gap Analysis format is the assignment and rubric are clear cut and laid out in the course plan.  The advantage of the Problem Statement format is the work is lighter, and (in theory) the work in Week 4 can be applied to Week 6, easing the load of the final Problem Solution Paper.

But what if you screw up and plow down the path of doing a Gap Analysis, when the professor wants a Problem Statement?  I’ll tell you what, and I don’t have to do this hypothetically because that is exactly what I did- again.

Each week I’ve taken to putting together a document that lists what the weekly readings are, what the assignment is, what the discussion questions are, and what some common references I use are.  Having all of this in one document makes for one place I can launch my work from each day.  If I’m not sure what I should be working on, I open up that document and there it is!  At the beginning of each class I also download the concept outline for the week, a mind map (graphical representation of the outline), the template (if any) associated with the assignment for the week and the rubric for the assignment.  I put all this stuff in a folder labeled for the week.

So I’ve got all my tools nice and organized, I’ve got my little document noting what I’m supposed to be doing, what could possibly go wrong?  Here’s what.  When the week 4 assignment is a problem statement rather than a gap analysis, it happens through the professor’s discretion.  The professor notes the change in the syllabus for the course, but the class resource page doesn’t change.  So when my professor changed the assignment, she noted the change in the syllabus.  Like all students of undergraduate or graduate school should know that the syllabus is the rule- all else doesn’t carry a lot of weight.  So I copy the assignment for the week from the Syllabus into my document outlining what has to be done for the week.  But when it came time to work on the assignment, I opened my folder and saw a gap analysis template.  So I started writing a gap analysis.  I was cruising along pretty good too.  Several hours into it spread over a few days, a Sunday afternoon to be exact, I got to the guts of the Gap Analysis and started to draw a blank.  I’ve done this stuff before, so I keep notes on how I like to approach each section, but I didn’t have any notes for the Gap section.  I decided to break the roadblock by scanning through the document, checking my word count, just sort of stretching my legs.  Then I noticed my word count was way too high for the assignment.  I’d clearly written too much but wasn’t done yet.  How is that possible?  Then it hit me- I was doing the wrong thing.  My notes clearly said “Write a problem solution”, but I had disregarded that as soon as I opened the Gap Analysis template.  If it’s a Gap Template, you write Gap right?  Wrong.

Thankfully I could salvage most of the work.  I had to do some creative mending, after all I was supposed to only come up what a document for to answer the question “what is the problem” and I had written “here’s the problem, here’s where the company wants to be” and was about to write “here’s the gap between the two”.  So I had to back down a bit.  The word count is still high, but I’m going to let it go.  The work of grinding it down to the target size isn’t worth the points I expect the teacher will knock off for being over the limit.

So what was the topic of all this writing?  Supply chain management, optimizing production so time and money isn’t wasted, focusing on the right things and not getting distracted by side stuff.  Pretty much everything I did wrong in writing the homework.

Time for Snacks Doesn’t Count as Study Time

Resource Optimization – Week 3 Weekly Summary

This week I faltered a little on the ‘1 hour per day minimum’ and that left more work for the weekend.  The bridge collapse in Minneapolis (you can read my thoughts on that on my other blog) provided enough of a distraction one night for me to postpone all but the minimum submissions, and the extra effort for one of the discussion questions burned a lot of my energy.

Week 3 was a problem solution week.  The problem solutions are about 30 pages long when complete and on average take about 8 1/2 hours to write.  That’s writing time, not ’screwing off and going to get an ice cream snack’ or ‘taking the dog for a 20 minute walk to clear my head’ time.  Those are extra.

The discussion topics of the week involved discussing best practices in working capital management and researching current events at Ford, discussing if the new leadership can revive the company, and listing recommendations for the board.  I was actually pleased with my response to the Ford discussion question, everything seemed to come together nicely for that one.  I even received some complementary comments from other students on the organization and readability of the response. 

I put the wraps on the problem solution around 10 Sunday night and have enough participation credit for the week, so technically I could take tonight off.  But tomorrow night is National Night Out and there is a street party scheduled for my ‘hood, so I may use today to do some of my usual “initialize a new week” work that would normally be done tomorrow.  That is not brain intensive stuff, just gathering the materials for the week and creating a new folder structure on my computer to store everything.  I could also dip into the reading for the week, as long as I don’t have to write stuff for a day.

Oops, too late.  I’m writing this.