MIS5102 (Sp12) - Process Improvement and Innovation

Leave your response as a comment on this post by the beginning of class on April 25. Remember, it only needs to be a few sentences.

Answer the following question:

What was the most important takeaway (from your perspective) from this course. If you had to explain to a future MIS5102 scholar what this course was about, what would you say?

Leave your response as a comment on this post by the beginning of class next week. Remember, it only needs to be a few sentences. For these weekly questions, I’m mainly interested in your opinions, not so much particular “facts” from the class!

Answer one of the questions below:

1. Describe a project (a technology project if possible) with which you have been involved that caused a power shift within an organization.
2. In your opinion, which methodology is more at risk to fail: agile or the waterfall model? Refer to the reasons for failure described in our readings in your answer.

Leave your response as a comment on this post by the beginning of class next week. Remember, it only needs to be a few sentences. For these weekly questions, I’m mainly interested in your opinions, not so much particular “facts” from the class!

Answer one of the questions below:

1. Since we didn’t have enough time to discuss it in class, look back at question 2 of this week’s exercise: for your example, which of your stakeholders do you think would be the most difficult to get on board? Why? Can you draw any general conclusions from this about getting people to buy into change?
2. Netflix had a highly publicized “change management” disaster last year with their Qwikster initiative. Take a look at this article about the debacle, and then use the rider/elephant/path analogy to explain what they did wrong in dealing with the customers.

Leave your response as a comment on this post by the beginning of class next week. Remember, it only needs to be a few sentences. For these weekly questions, I’m mainly interested in your opinions, not so much particular “facts” from the class!

Answer one of the questions below:

1. In your organization, do you tend to make decisions based more on quantitative or qualitative metrics? Why do you think this is the case? Do you think you are well-served by your approach?
2. What do you think is the most important factor in making a good decision regarding project selection? Explain your answer.

Leave your response as a comment on this post by the beginning of class next week. Remember, it only needs to be a few sentences. For these weekly questions, I’m mainly interested in your opinions, not so much particular “facts” from the class!

Answer one of the questions below:

1. Give an example of a project on which you’ve worked  (either professionally or otherwise) where you’ve had to make a tradeoff between time, scope, and cost. What factors affected your choice?
2. Take another look at the “14 Common Mistakes” article from this week’s readings. Which mistake do you think is the most important to avoid? Why?

The weekly discussion question is on Spring Break. It will return when we resume classes on March 14.

Leave your response as a comment on this post by the beginning of class next week. Remember, it only needs to be a few sentences. For these weekly questions, I’m mainly interested in your opinions, not so much particular “facts” from the class!

Answer one of the questions below:

1. In your opinion, what was the most important takeaway from our guest speaker’s (Barbara Dolhansky) presentation regarding the University’s ERP implementation? Did anything surprise you?
2. There is a rising trend of people predicting the “end of ERP,” mostly due to the rise of distributed, cloud-based services. A good example is this line of thought is this recent Forbes article (which is a quick, interesting read even if you answer question #1). Do you agree with the article that ERP’s days are numbered?

Leave your response as a comment on this post by the beginning of class next week. Remember, it only needs to be a few sentences. For these weekly questions, I’m mainly interested in your opinions, not so much particular “facts” from the class!

Answer one of the following:

1. In class we discussed a self-serve data entry model for CVS. Do you think this change to their prescription fulfillment process would serve overshot or undershot customers? Would it create new customers by addressing non-consumers?
2. Think about the “problem” you addressed during this week’s in-class activity. Were you able to find a root cause? Was the problem more complex than you originally thought? Did anything surprise you?