Archives for the Month of December 2005 on James Lowe's Online Journal
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.
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.
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.