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.

Workload:  Heavy
Teaching Style:  Very interactive
Interest in students:Very high
Relevance to outside world: Very high

Overall Professor Rating:4.75
Overall Course Rating:5
If there is one elective to be taken during one’s time at the Leavey School of Business, it is Management 516, with Professor Dennis Moberg.  The course is on Organizational Politics and is not only about that, [...]

Workload:  Moderate
Teaching Style:  Interactive
Interest in students:  Moderate
Relevance to outside world:  Low

Overall Professor Rating: 2
Overall Course Rating: 2.5
It is incredibly hard to summarize a review on Professor DR Palmer (who is different than Professor David R. Palmer, by the way).  [...]

Workload:  Light
Teaching Style:  Highly interactive
Interest in students:  Very high
Relevance to outside world:  Not sure.

Overall Professor Rating: 4
Overall Course Rating:3.5
Professor Tep is a completely different professor than anyone other you are likely to have at SCU.  He believes not only in experiential learning but also in spirituality and looking at things with a much [...]

Workload:  Light
Teaching Style:  Interactive (kind of)
Interest in students: High
Relevance to outside world:  Low

Overall Professor Rating: 2.5
Overall Course Rating: 2
Marketing 551 is a hard class for the SCU program.  Many have described it as an undergraduate-level course and I would agree, even as someone without any background in the marketing side of things.  So [...]

Introduction

I took this course from Professor Ling-Jing Kao during my third quarter in the MBA program at Santa Clara University. This is an introductory marketing course that all MBA students must either take or waive.

Instructor profile

Professor Kao is a recent Ph. D. who began her teaching career at SCU in 2006.

Classroom experience

Most classes began with Professor Kao handing out lecture notes and other material (already stapled and 3-hole-punched) then a student summarizing the main topics of the previous lecture. The class was structured as a lecture with a reasonable amount of in-class discussion moderated by the instructor. The content followed the pre-published lecture notes closely.

During a few classes, we watched videos (two video split over three or four classes) that described marketing strategies undertaken by two consumer companies. After the videos we discussed them briefly in class and tied some future lecture topics back to the videos. These video cases were the subject of some mid-term and final exam questions.

The basic framework for the material was provided by the Harvard Business School publication “Note on Marketing Strategy” describing on overview of the marketing process. We referred back to this again and again as we moved through the lectures and homework.

Professor Kao kept class time well balanced among lecture and discussion, and rarely let the class go very far off topic. Some of the discussions went very well, but there were a number of subject areas where she just didn’t seem to be able to answer students’ questions for one reason or another. Some of it may have been due a language gap, but I also suspect that Professor Kao is very well versed in certain areas such as consumer market research, but less comfortable fielding questions on other topics.

Coursework, exam, and grades

There were two exams and two group papers. Each was roughly 25% of the final course grade.

The exams mostly drew on lecture material and the video cases discussed in class. The exams were each part multiple-choice, part short essay question. A few of the multiple choice questions may have been on topics covered in the required reading but not in class.

The projects each involved producing a concisely-written 4-page paper that follows the marketing strategy model from the HBS paper. 4 pages isn’t a lot of text, although we were allowed unlimited exhibits, which could themselves be somewhat wordy. In the editing process my group critically evaluated which ideas and recommendations were relevant and which didn’t fit. I didn’t get much insight into how closely Professor Kao followed her own grading guidelines.

I came into this course not really knowing what marketing was, and by the end I had a solid understanding of the scope of marketing activities, where they belong in the business planning and execution cycles, and a very strong concept of appropriate and inappropriate uses of the basic types of market research. I used this knowledge right away to ask intelligent questions about marketing and strategy at my own workplace and in a start-up venture that a colleague embarked on.

Criticisms

Professor Kao didn’t add as much real world insight into marketing topics as I had hoped. I suspect that this is because all of her expertise is in market research and she has only a few quarter’s experience fielding discussions with graduate students.

Although there was regular required reading from the textbook (Kotler and Keller), it was easy for me to skip the readings and keep up with the class until I hit those few exam questions that relied on the text. Professor Kao indicated that she thought the text was difficult to work with, but she expected us to read it because it is a widely used textbook that almost every MBA student is familiar with.

Another student described this course in general (not just Professor Kao’s section) as being an simple undergraduate Marketing course packaged as a graduate course. That might be somewhat valid, but for the group of students in my course, starting an MBA program without this knowledge, the content seemed appropriate.

Recommendation

I would recommend taking this course from Professor Kao because it was well structured and covered the basic marketing model and market research techniques thoroughly. Because Professor Kao doesn’t have industry experience, a different instructor with a professional background may add a lot of value for many students. Also, if you are a new MBA student who already has some marketing education you should consider waiving this course altogether.

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.