December 07, 2005
The HR Annual Report
On November 30th my HR Simulation group met and began discussing how we were going to create our company's final report. Most of the final report was just a continuation of our first annual report, so it didn't take too long to create. Once again I had the job of describing our goals and how our company went about achieving those goals. Our annual report was finally completed on Wednesday. With the completion of this report the HR simulation is finally over. Our team made the decisions that we thought were best for our company and hopefully we will do well on our final grade for the project. The last thing that must be done are the peer evalutions and the assigning of executive bonuses. In the end the HR simulation was a good project for our management class.
December 04, 2005
HR Simulation Comes to a Close
On November 30th my HR simulation team got together and completed the last budget and incedent for quater 8 in the HR game. Overall this game has been enjoyable to see what happens with certain decisions but it is very inconsistent and weak after the first couple quaters. I believe this because once a group starts a program the group can't undo the program or make it better. The only thing that can change is the amouont of money that a team puts into their safety, quality, and management training programs. And the only other thing that can change other than those three programs is wages and fringe benefits. I just think that this simulation is very weak at showing what would really happen in a real business environment. The only part of the simulation that seems to be true is the incident reports, but again they are not very strong. They make the team think about what actions to take in order to not make people anger with them and thats basically it. Overall the simulation is a good idea because it makes the students work in teams to make an organization prosperous.
Performance Appraisals
On November 17th the class continued our discussion on the different forms of performance apprasials. A few of the apprasial types arer the graphic rating scale, paired comparison, and the 360 performance apprasial. I thought that the 360 apprasial was the best option because as the name suggests it is more thorough than the other options. Later that day the class had a special session with a guest speaker on performance management. The speaker was pretty good and he was very enthusiastic. In order to describe performance apprasials he used three students in a test, to teach the ABCs to the class and we had to rate them. This was a pretty funny exercise. Overall the speaker was great but I got to say the best part of the session was the pizza and pop.
December 01, 2005
Another Disappointment
When I completed part II of my Learning Plan I was pretty confident that I had done everything in order to how it was suppose to have been done. But unexpectedly, after getting my part II back from Tracey Messer, there were comments everywhere. See basically tore apart everything I wrote trying to question every uncertainty that she somehow formulated. This is weird seeing that the goals are not hers, so she really needs to grade impartially, but it is evident that she didn't. She even wrote on the top of my paper that my goals don't apply to the SMART criteria. This is pretty funny to me seeing that when I wrote part II, I had the SMART goals paper and the grading criteria for part II in front of me, writing the goals to correspond with them. Then later in class, Prof. Powley tells the class that the Learning Plans can only be 15-16 pages maximum in length. This was frustrating but I laughed knowing that every person that I know had finished papers at about 20 pages. I am actually starting to wonder whether or not the professor and the TAs really know what they want out of these Learning Plans.
November 19, 2005
Learning Plan Part II
Today I started and finished writing the second part of the Learning Plan. The topic seemed much easier for me to handle because I really didn't have to think about goals that I wanted to talk about seeing that I had previously formulated them for myself. My four goals were getting a summer internship at GM, going to graduate school, learning more about investing, and starting a personal work out program. I applied these topics to the SMART criteria that was required by Prof. Powley, which wasn't too difficult. During our next class we are suppose to have peer evaluations and then if requested the teaching assistant could grade look at it. I was pretty happy with what I wrote, and I hope that this part turns out to be better than my last part.
November 04, 2005
Learning Plan Disappointment
Yesterday after discussing the Jonah Creighton Case Study, Professor Powley handed back the Learning Plan part I to us. Most everyone in the class got a bad grade. This makes no sense. The paper is about ourselve and we have someone grading our writing about ourself and telling us that its not good enough. Tracy Messer tried to tell the class that the bad grades were because of a lack of creativity. That doesn't even make sense for this paper. The items and topics that were to be discussed in the paper don't require creativity, they are factual topics and opinions about ourselves. Another thing is that both the professor and Tracey were trying to say that its ok because this part is not worth that many points. This is clearly not the issue to me. This paper, like the professor and Tracey stated over and over, was to be a ROUGH DRAFT for the final paper due at the end of the semester. They clearly did not grade this paper as a rough draft. Most everyone got that I have talked with are extremely mad about their grade. Getting a 5's and 6's out of 8 on a paper about ourselves is going to make anyone mad. Overall I am extremely disappointed with the grading of this paper and I hope, for the sack of next semester, that more information about this paper is given to the students so that they can actually write a paper that may be satisfactory to these graders.
Jonah Creighton Case Study
Yesterday our class discussed the Jonah Creighton case. Following my grading contract, I had to write a four to six page analysis of this case study. After reading Jonah's case I was in complete agreement with Jonah. I thought that what the overseas units of Coulding-Henson were doing was extremely wrong. Discrimination is a very serious issue both for minorities and for social classes. I believe that everyone should have an equaly opportunity when it comes to getting a job, going to college, or even just doing something as simple as playing a sport. Personally I believe that the minority discrimination is begining to be fazed out but I think that social/economic discrimination is an even larger problem. In Jonah Creighton's Case it was all about racial discrimination, which for a company could be very devistating legally. I think that Jonah was right for pursueing the issue but I think that he should have gone to Craig Andrews, the Executive VP and creator of CHAMP, instead of going to people he knew did care about the issue like Dan Newell and Gordon Harris.