Christopher Lambert's Online Journal

For a class teaching about Human Resource skills and management...

I don't understand how we can take the HR simulation seriously when those in charge of it have made so many egregious mistakes. Two of the biggest problems are that communication has only been consistent in the fact that it's last-minute, and the decisions handed down to us seem arbitrary and of the tone "deal with it".

The late announcement of teams and team leaders, that there was no time set aside in class for initial team discussion, and the confusion on how to pick up our results are three more serious lapses in communication.

Fall break was handled poorly; no one said results weren't being e-mailed and that a hard copy was available in PBL. Even if the information was made available, many students had already left campus for fall break. The explanation e-mail from Professor Poonamalle came Monday the 23rd. Not to be overlooked, the only reason for the e-mail was because someone took the time to e-mail her and ask what was going on. I'm afraid there wouldn't have been any contact if an initial query hadn't been sent out.

It took until Saturday to receive an e-mail that results could not be picked up on Friday the 27th.

I've heard horror stories from several teams about how severe errors have been made in data entry.

Here's an e-mail one of my team members sent to Professor Poonamallee explaining the errors in our 4th quarter results:

"Professor Poonamallee,

I picked up the results for our team today, and they are completely
wrong as there were several errors when the data was inputted. Here are
the highlights:

- Our budget planning form states that we have raised costs for the
safety program to $22,000. The output states that they are $15,000.
- Our promotion training was $1,000, but the output says they are $15,000.
- Our management training was $15,000, but the output says they are
$25,000.
- Our decision form states that we are keeping fringe benefits the same,
at 22.3, but the output shows us as increasing them to 23.1
- The incident expense of $10,000 was not charged to our budget.
- Our wage increase was calculated as $169,485, but the output says they
are $122,000. I don't know if the problem is on our end or yours, but I
would like an explanation for this large discrepancy.
- Along the same line, I would to see how our hiring costs were
calculated for the output results, as there is an $18,000 discrepancy.
- The output states that the CEO is very unhappy that we exceeded our
budget, but clearly this is a result of the copious amount of errors in
data entry. Our budget form shows us as being under budget.
- The same goes for the CEO being upset about our decision for Incident
D - but of course we didn't follow Incident D.

I believe those are all the errors, although there may be more. Our
results need to be re-entered into the system so we can go forward with
our annual report and decisions for the next quarter."

I don't understand how that happens. If it was a mistake on our part, why is there no explanation for what we did wrong that warrants a complete change in our decisions? Why should we spend the time and effort of making decisions if they're going to be skewed with no way to correct the mistake?

Why do we put together a decision form, a budget form, a simulation journal and an incident report if they, and us in the "HR department", are not taken seriously?

Maybe the better question is this: if what we do is a joke to the administration, why should we take this class seriously?