Introduction

I took Managing Teams and Projects from Professor Bo Tep in Spring 2008. This is an elective course in the MBA program at Santa Clara University. I took it as a late-night class, starting at 8:30 PM, before the business school eliminated that schedule spot.

Instructor profile

Professor Tep had a career in the telecommunications industry before moving recently to academia as a second career.

Classroom experience

The most important thing to point out is that half of most class sessions was spend on presentations and activities led by a student team. Each team was responsible for planning two group presentations that taught something substantial while keeping the class interested. Most of these involved some traditional talking over PowerPoint slides, a teamwork-related game, and a follow-up discussion relating the game experience to the topic in question.

Professor Tep made a few things clear at the start of the course. First of all, the course is all about teams, and not about projects. Second, Professor Tep tries to improve the course from quarter to quarter, so some things students have heard about previous sections may or may not apply to this section of the course. Of course, every instructor should make conscious improvements. When I started writing this series of course reviews, this statement influenced me to be sure to phrase my essays as reviews of specific course sections, not as timeless reviews of the course or the instructor.

Another thing to note is that Professor Tep used some of the course’s main themes about adult learners to structure the course itself. Students were assigned to teams by Professor Tep at the first class. The teams lasted all quarter, and most of the course work was done within these teams. Each team was responsible for two in-class presentations and two group papers during the quarter.

Each class had a topic corresponding to a chapter from the textbook, Joining Together by the Johnson brothers. Some chapters were split into two classes. As I noted above, about half of each class session was taken by a presentation led by one of the teams. The remaining time was spent with a short prepared lecture and general class discussion moderated by Professor Tep.

Coursework, exams, and grades

Each team was responsible for two group presentations, a mid-term paper, and a final paper. Each topic was expected to be 8-10 pages on one of the course topics. Groups had considerable leeway to define the subjects of their paper. Two individual papers were supposed to account for a total 15% of the course grade, but midway through the course Professor Tep made the second individual paper optional.

What I learned

I took a deeper dive into some of the topics that I learned about in MGMT 501. Most of this learning was about topics chosen for my individual and group projects: Sources of power and status within groups, positive and negative outcomes of intergroup conflict, and conflicts arising from mergers and acquisitions.

I also learned some things about effective presentations, spurred by Professor Tep’s high standard for keeping the whole class engaged in the class presentations, and a healthy competitive spirit between project teams.

Professor Tep’s lectures emphasized the importance of building trust within a team and the group leader’s responsibility for candid 1:1 communication outside of group interactions. I learned several group work techniques that were immediately applicable to MBA course projects — so I’m particularly glad that I chose to take this course early in the program.

Criticisms

It was too easy to skim through many of the topics, and because some of the topics were not discussed deeply in class, I missed some of the core material. Part of this is due to the fact that group presentations and group-led activities – a major component of this course – took up almost half the total class time.

I think it the course could have been structured for more breadth if Professor Tep required individual papers to be on specific topics, or planned lecture time with a bit more structure.

Recommendation

Once you visualize yourself engaging in an hour or two of games during the quarter, and planning and leading two of these activity sessions, you may have an easy time deciding whether you want to take this Professor Tep’s MGMT 538 class! I believe that every MBA student at Santa Clara should consider this course as an elective. If you have your heart set on a career that does not involve any work in permanent or temporary teams, or influencing external teams or assisting them in conflict resolution, an MBA might not be the right degree program for you anyway.

Trailer

This article was first written in 2008 by Dylan Salisbury for dylansalisbury.com. All rights reserved. I added this paragraph because spam blog sites pick up copies of my blog posts.

For a list of course reviews and a disclaimer, visit my Course Reviews page.

Allan Chen posted a review of this course from Winter 2007 on his blog.