Welcome to Business Operations Management, Term A. This is your basic make-or-break term, witness our schedule (left), and then we went and filled it up with extracurriculars. Wasn’t that a good idea? (It actually was but boy, did it add to the stress levels.)
For those who are interested: blue is our classes, green is major assignments, and all of that brown and light blue is the extracurriculars. Take particular note of the major assignments due Wednesday, Thursday and Friday consecutively and you’ll see that they’re complemented nicely by the mandatory plant tours and professional networking events (not mandatory but recommended). Kind of a tough week, and not just for the second years – the first years had the final report and presentation this Tuesday for their first process improvement projects and you could tell by the red eyes and general exhaustion of those who turned up for the Monday morning APICS board meeting.
Now, take a week like that and stick it on the end of two weeks just like it, add eight projects in various courses (each of which has a different team, made up of some combination of the same 11 people), then add some extra 7:30 am meetings and stir. That, right there, is a good recipe for stress.
On the positive side, all of those 7:30 meetings weren’t just for the sake of losing sleep. They were also adding value to the program since we, the students of BCIT’s Business Operations Management, are planning an event that will showcase our program and the value that people with our training can bring to any workplace. Not to mention the value we can bring as students – works-in-process, if you will – with our Directed Studies (DS) projects.
We’re going to have booths from our local professional associations as well as displays on sustainable operations, operations management tools and techniques, and a demonstration of RFID technology. On top of that, students will be putting together static displays of their in-progress and previously completed DS projects – with a couple of live presentations from the Fall 2010 project teams to liven things up and provide an example of the results that can be achieved by our student teams.
We will close the night with a Speaker’s Panel that will be discussing the experiences of our graduates in industry, as well as the experiences of companies that have employed Business Operations Management graduates. It’s going to be a really cool night and organizing it is giving the teams and team leaders some really good experience in project management.
I’m a Sub-Team Leader in the Promotions group, we’re sending out open invitations to local businesses to come and check it out. I’m particularly proud of all the green on my dashboard (below), which is a direct result of how awesome my team is. Thank you guys!
If you’re interested in more details of the event, our website is:
Or, if you’re interested in the behind the scenes of organizing the event, check out our blog at:
http://experienceresults.wordpress.com
ETA: My classmate, Elena, has posted a similar article (in Russian, but Google translates reasonably well) on her blog (http://freesunny.blogspot.com/2011/03/4-2011.html).
