Building a warehouse - with post-its

A new term and a new team. The second term started off with a rigorous 1-week project management course which concluded with a simulation of building a warehouse. We had to come up with a project plan to build a warehouse adhering to the different conditions laid out in the project contract. The actual construction process was simulated over half a day with each construction week scaled down to 20 minutes. The goal was to complete the project with the maximum profit.

It was fun to see each person resorting to his/her tool of choice for the simulation. Many relied on MS Excel to crunch all those numbers. The first thing that I did was to open MS Project. I listed out the activities and started scheduling them. In spite of my experience in using MS Project, I found myself struggling to flexibly allocate the resources (labour in this case). By the way, we had been advised that using tools like Excel and MS Project doesn't help much, but do we listen?

Anyway, the idea was not to rely too much on these tools and plan the whole project on the wall using paper and post-its. And boy, did it work! I am now totally convinced with the power of visual project management. Every possible information that we needed was on the wall. The simulation involved assessing the project progress reported to us and submitting an action form indicating the new activities to execute and the resources that had to be allocated for those activities. With all the data neatly captured on the wall, every person in the team was able to fill-in the action plan within seconds. And when a surprise activity was thrown on to us during the simulation, we were able to easily move around the post-its and reschedule the project.

The visual plan gave each member a complete overview of the project at a glance and helped them to adjust their own activities accordingly. The fact that the plan was on the wall, and not on a computer screen, forced us to be on our feet and be agile in our responses.

More than anything, the simulation was one good team building exercise. It helped me understand and bond with my new team (of six, including me) in a matter of days. We had just about 2 days to sort out our roles in the project, come up with a solid project plan and endure the execution amidst some surprises woven into the simulation. The team worked together brilliantly as we all put in our best. The visual management on the wall removed the centrality of one person (the person in front of the screen) controlling the plan and helped us to work as a team. And this was clearly reflected in the results - a 12.5% profit and completion of the project on schedule - best in the stream and third best in the cohort!

Living on campus

There is just one word to describe the campus right now during the winter holiday season - dead. There is nothing happening here. The school is closed. So are the stores. And to top it all, the snow, the cloudy weather and the cold makes it all the more depressing.

But I wouldn't want to stay anywhere else if I was studying at Cranfield. The campus is definitely the place to be. I think this is where Cranfield scores high above all the other business schools in terms of providing a great campus, a decent on-campus accommodation and a very family-friendly atmosphere.

Accommodations
The Cranfield website provides a great deal of information regarding the on-campus accommodations. Singles can choose between Mitchell Hall, Stringfellow Hall, Lanchester Hall and Chilver Hall. I have personally been to the rooms in Stringfellow Hall and Lanchester Hall and both are reasonably good. Stringfellow Hall is one of the newest and most students I spoke to say they are quite happy about it. A lot of people complain about the en suite toilets in Chilver Hall and compare them to toilets on airplanes. Stringfellow, Lanchester and Chilver are self-catered which means that there is a common kitchen, typically shared amongst 6 residents. Mitchell Hall has no kitchen and students get food coupons for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The rooms in Mitchell Hall are also supposedly small (somebody referred to them as bunkers).

Families don't get to choose the type of accommodation they want. It is allocated based on the size of the family. Couples without children get accommodation in the Fedden house. These are studio apartments and I am yet to hear anything good about Fedden house. General feedback indicates that the apartments are too small, not well maintained and not warm enough in the winter.

Families with children are allocated so-called "family houses" - two bedroom houses for those with a single child and three bedroom houses for families with two kids. We are residing in a two bedroom house. My first impression was that the house was quite small and also old. But comparing the house to the other accommodations around Cranfield, I came to the conclusion that the accommodation is actually fairly decent.

Here are a couple of snaps of the two bedroom family house accommodation.

The rooms are reasonably sized. There is free internet connection - the university LAN connection connects you directly to the university intranet as well as the internet. The speed is comparable to broadband and I have had no issues with it so far. Heating and electricity has to be paid for separately i.e., in addition to the rent, which is unlike the other accommodations on campus. Heating costs around £50 per month and electricity is about the same. If you need a landline telephone connection, you can get it through BT. We just have mobile phones and opted not to have a separate landline. Free-to-air TV is available in all houses. There is a TV cable connection and all you need is a DVB-T receiver or a DVB-T enabled TV. We get about 50 free-to-air channels which is fairly good (given that we students will not have any time for TV). Don't forget that you need to get a TV license in case you own a TV or watch any kind of live-streaming entertainment on the internet. Having your own satellite dish antennas and satellite TV is largely discouraged but I don't see anyone following the rules around here as every street is lined up with satellite dishes.

The family houses are not without their caveats. The houses are not well insulated. Cold draft seeps in through the doors and heating costs are bound to increase. There is just one LAN port in the entire house and that is located in the main bedroom. I was expecting additional LAN ports in the house, at least one in the living area. How do you expect family members to sleep and their student spouses to work in the same room?
It is also not possible to have wireless access in the on-campus accommodations. Every device needs to be centrally registered and Cranfield IT does not allow so-called managed wireless/wired routers due to security reasons.
There is just about sufficient space for a dish washer or a washing machine in the kitchen but its quite difficult to fit them both in. I had to struggle a lot to have both these devices in the kitchen and had to do some extra plumbing myself to share the water inlets and outlets between the devices. There are laundromats nearby on campus, so all you need is just the dishwasher, but with a kid around it is so much more convenient to have a washing machine in house.

Campus facilities
Even if the accommodation is a bit of a let down from some, there are still many good reasons to live on campus. For one, the feeling of living on a campus surrounded by other students and their families is simply great. It is not one student family amidst the 'others'. We are all in the same boat, so there is a good deal of understanding and cooperation amongst the families.

The school building is a few minutes walk from any of the accommodations. There is never a rush as you don't have to plan for any traffic jams, etc., to be at the school on time. It also means an MBA with a smaller carbon footprint! The short distance from the school gives me the opportunity to just pop-by and spend some quality time with my family during breaks.

There is a nursery and a pre-school right on campus. There is also a medical center on campus which is again quite convenient if you have a child. Basic grocery shopping can be done at the Costcutter store on campus. A post office is also located within the Costcutter store. Closeby is the NatWest bank as well as a couple of ATMs.
In addition to the sports hall where one can play badminton, basketball, football, tennis and table-tennis, Mitchell and Lanchester halls also have squash courts. I personally have done more sports in the last couple of months than ever before and I think its due to the fact that these facilities are accessible (and over the weekends too). Incidentally, the partners/spouses get their own access cards (at least if you are a School of Management student) which means that the partners also have access to all these facilities.

There are many places to eat on campus. Again the Cranfield website provides a comprehensive list of eateries in the vicinity. Some of these are open over the weekends too, so if you are not in a mood to cook, you can get some good food for a few bucks.

I think more than anything what makes living on campus so interesting for us is the family friendly atmosphere here. The partners/spouses have many opportunities to get together and share some activities as we students are holed up in our syndicate rooms or are being WACed out. During Christmas, the Cranfield Students' Association had arranged a Christmas party for kids which my family thoroughly enjoyed. The Community Centre is extremely helpful and go out of the way to find any kind of information you may be seeking. They also arrange day trips to nearby locations like Oxford, Cambridge and London.

I believe living on campus truly completes the student life experience - just taking a walk through the campus and looking at all the school buildings and the Cranfield logo everywhere is a constant reminder that this year is a special year of being a student all over again.

E.O.T

End of Term. Yes, unbelievable but true. The first term lasted just 11 weeks - 10 weeks of classes and a week of exams. This is how the one-year MBA works - before you know it, it's done.

But it's been a fun-filled 10 weeks. It's unimaginable how much we got things done together as individuals, as a team and as a stream. 1 individual report, 2 WAC reports, 4 group reports, a simulation exercise and 2 group presentations. Plus the sports, socializing, listening to guest speakers, representative the stream for the entrepreneurship activities and a bit of career-planning. And in between doing some justice to your loved ones who have joined you on this roller-coaster ride.

It doesn't come as a surprise, of course. Many of my friends who had already experienced this had told me that it is going to be just one hectic year and that the year is going to fly by even before you notice it. Hectic it was, but what truly shocked me is the pace at which the first term got over. At this rate, it won't be long before its 9th of September 2011, the day my MBA year ends at Cranfield!

The learning has been excellent until now. It felt wonderful studying certain subjects which I always had a liking for but which I could not pursue in my career so far. On that note, the subjects next term are even more exciting.
The team work wasn't all that easy - a bunch of 5 strangers put together and expected to work 5-6 hours together on a daily basis. It's rather different in a professional environment where there is generally more time to build bonds (except in consulting where the team lifetime is rather short) or the option to keep things purely at a professional level. The Organizational Behavior (OB) exercises forces you to be very open to your team whether you like it or not. But at the end of the day this is all learning at its best. Every exercise teaches you to see through and interpret all the subtleties that make or break a team.

Personally, I think the one-year MBA boils down to one single fact - the more you put in, the more you get out of it. (Isn't it true for life in general??) I must admit that in this regard I could have done a lot more in the first term. But I hope to concentrate on a couple of important things in the second term. I plan to focus more on the entrepreneurship front, start exploring ideas and participate in the planned competitions. Focus on career planning will definitely take the lead from now on. I am also interested in pursuing an external project but I need to see how practical it is. In any case, I need to start planning for my 3rd term project. It is also the time to start putting together the electives to take in the 3rd and 4th term and select those that are best aligned with my career goals.

Well, the winter vacation starts today but it's not going to last long. School reopens on 10th of Jan and will again last just 10 weeks. The case packs for the second term are already being issued!

But it's still a good 3 weeks of vacation and I plan to make the most of it (in spite of the expected cold and snow) with my family here at Cranfield.

Bean counters and brand managers

Exhaused and elated. That pretty much summarizes how I am feeling today. This weekend we had our second WAC - the last one for this term. In all we spent 6 hours discussing the Accounting WAC in our team plus another 2 hours with the entire stream. 8 hours of non-stop focus on the problem, followed by a quick dinner and back to report writing all by myself.

By 4am in the morning, my progress had drastically gone down but I wasn't feeling sleepy either. Nevertheless, I decided to give my eyes a bit of a rest and the moment I hit the sack, I was fast asleep. 3.5 hours of undisturbed sleep and I was digging back into the report by 7.30am. It wasn't until 12.30pm that I was done with the report and quite pleased with it too! I was in no hurry to go over and submit the report. I had a nice hot shower and a good lunch before proceeding to the campus to hand-in the 16-page document. This was followed by a couple of beers at the Socials to sooth my nerves.

But the WAC wasn't the end of a work-weekend. We, i.e., my learning team, also had to prepare for our 'Strategic Marketing Success' presentation which was scheduled for early in the morning today. The Strategic Marketing Success, or SMS as we call it, is part of the Strategic Marketing module. We are expected to choose a company which we think has executed a successful marketing strategy, write a 2500 page report on the topic as a group and present the topic to our stream as a group. Our company of choice was Netflix, the American online DVD rental and on-demand video streaming company. This was the first report that we wrote as a group and I must admit that the learning team almost came apart before we were done with the report! The team dynamics had gone astray and our effectiveness was at its lowest.

However, I believe that we made up for it with the presentation. With all the other things on our plate last week, we had failed to even come up with a storyline for the SMS presentation. We met at 2pm on Sunday and worked 8 straight hours together until 10pm and got the presentation in order. I must admit that it was one of the best teamwork that I have experienced in my learning team until now. We all knew that we were extremely short on time and we all gave our best to get the script right, to connect the dots and to prepare ourselves for the big event the next day.

And the teamwork was clearly visible in today's presentation. Today, we finished it well within the time, the props worked, the handovers were smooth, and most important of all, the audience easily grasped the storyline. Way to go, Team B4!

The WAC!

Today we submitted our very first WAC - Written Assessment of a Case. What a concept! I wonder if this is unique to Cranfield.

Here are the important highlights about the WAC.

WAC Weekend 

This crazy thing called the WAC starts on a Friday afternoon, typically at 14:00 hours. Our WAC was an exception as this Friday happened to be day of the Indian festival, Diwali, and many Indians in the cohort requested for a small change so that they could get some time on Friday to celebrate the festival before jumping in into the WAC. So the WAC weekend began at 16:00hrs this Friday on the 5th of November.

The idea of a WAC is fairly simple. We are given a case to analyse and to prepare a 1500-word report providing our recommendations/suggestions on the case. Simple, isn't it? What makes the WAC different is that the report has to be presented within 24 hours of receiving the case. The case is handed over to us at 14:00 hrs on a Friday afternoon and the report has to be submitted by 14:00 hrs the next day i.e., by Saturday afternoon. This is the WAC weekend.

WAC Dumps

Cracking the WAC involves the usual learning layers of the self, the learning team and the stream. Once the case is handed over, we took some time to go through the case individually. Then we spent a couple of hours discussing the case as a team. Discussions in the team, just like the usual daily discussions, are only meant to bring about more clarity on the topic. There is no guarantee that all the team members will arrive at the same conclusion on the case. In face, this is not the intention.

After the discussions in the learning team, we had what is known as the stream dump. The stream gets together and with one or two people leading the discussions, we go through the case as a stream - without any professor or lecturer. Again, the insights from 50+ people is absolutely valuable to get a good hold of the case. The stream dump is generally planned for 2 hours and I found it to be the most valuable two hours for the WAC. No thought is ridiculed or hushed down in the stream dump. Every voice is unique and respected. There are no arguments because there is no pressure on anyone to accept any line of thought. Thoughts are just spoken out and it is up to you as an individual to decide if you want to consider that thought for your own report.

It is just amazing how over 50 people come together and so constructively discuss a case and arrive at meaningful conclusions in such a structured manner. This reminds me that every bit of the Cranfield MBA is an awesome learning experience.

WAC Pizzas

Following the stream dump, we huddled together back in our syndicate rooms to continue the discussions with our learning teams. By this time, which was around 6 hours since the case was handed over, we had a fairly good idea as to how each of us wanted to crack the case. But Cranfield forces you to still work as a team especially under this time pressure. Although each of our reports would be written by us as individuals, the report had to have a team appendix i.e., a set of appendices that would be common to the entire team. This meant that we had to work as a team and agree on certain things as a group to arrive at a common set of appendices. Believe me, this is not easy when it is 20:00 hrs in the evening, time is running out and the hunger is killing you.

And that is when the WAC Pizzas arrive to the rescue. To ensure that we don't spend too much time on food, the stream representatives collect money from the students and arrange for pizzas to be delivered to the syndicate rooms. Mightily convenient when you are so engrossed in those discussions. By the time the pizzas were finished, we had reached an agreement on the group appendices.

So we had a fairly good idea in which direction to proceed and we had an agreement on the team appendices. All that was left was to actually start writing the 1500 word report.

WAC Night

It's funny how easy it is to stay awake once it becomes clear to you that the entire night is absolutely essential to get that report done. The toughest part lies in arriving at a framework that you would be satisfied with. It is so easy to keep moving those headings around all night long but at some point you need to accept the inevitable, which is that your report will never be perfect. In my case, this realization occurred at around 01:00 hrs Saturday morning. For my next report, I have promised myself not to spend more than an hour on arriving at the structure.

After the structure is in place, the words simply flow (at least for me). So I spent the next two hours until 03:00 in the morning to get a good part of the report ready. Confident that I could finish it on time, I decided to get some shut-eye even though my brain was too excited to sleep. But the moment I hit the sack, I was in deep sleep.

Three hours of sleep and I was back at my laptop tapping away. Three hours of sleep is actually pretty good for a WAC night. For many people, it means a sleepless night. Especially true for those not comfortable with the English language.

WAC Buddies

And this is where the WAC Buddies fit in. ‘WAC buddies’ is a support system offered by the Cranfield School of Management for non-native English speaking students through which the students can avail help with respect to grammar checking their WAC reports before submission. The support does not involve making any structural changes or offering advice on the content of the report.

The school on its part designates one person, either from the faculty or an external, who helps students with the grammar check. But the buddy system is mostly student run and led by the Diversity representatives. Fellow students whose native language is English volunteer as buddies to help those who need their reports to be checked for grammar. This typically takes place a few hours before the report submission deadline, around the time when the volunteers would have already submitted their own reports and would have the time to support the others in the cohort. 

WAC Deadline

A soft-copy of the report had to be submitted to the online plagiarism detector tool called "TurnItIn". A hard copy of the report is submitted to the security guys at the Security Gatehouse since the administrative offices are closed on a Saturday. The reports are time-stamped at the security gate. Late submissions incur a penalty of 5%.

Our submission deadline was at 18:00hrs today, the 6th of November, thanks to the Diwali festival. It is amazing to watch the printers working relentlessly just around the WAC deadline. Fortunately the school has ample number of high-speed color laser printers across the campus. The IT guys at Cranfield have setup a smart print-queuing system which means that you print to a queue and not to a specific printer. Once you have sent the document to a queue, you can print from any available printer using a special printer-access card. This really saves the bother of physically queuing at a printer or for that matter the problems of broken-down printers.

WAC Beer

There is one place where every student turns up right after submitting their WAC report and that is the Social club. You haven't slept much in the last 24 hours, you haven't eaten properly either and nor have you had the time to take a shower (or even brush your teeth!). But there you go - a beer is the only way to bring the WAC to an end!

WAC Learning

So, what's the point in doing all this? I definitely kept thinking about this for a while. Why subject us to this mad concept of analysing a case and submitting a report in 24 hours? I am sure we could have come up with much better reports had we done this in a more relaxed manner.

But isn't that true for everything? We always wish that we had more time but life just isn't that fair. The whole exercise of the WAC helps you to prioritise what you want to do during those 24 hours. It teaches you to streamline the way you assimilate a vast amount of knowledge, integrate the learning from different subject areas, get the best out of your team and your stream, and importantly it prepares you to cope with and excel under stressful conditions.

The WAC is a true Cranfield tradition and an essential ingredient of the Cranfield experience.

3 Steps to Epiphany (aka, the 3-Day Cycle)

At the start of the term, we were handed over big 'case packs' for each of the 6 subjects that we are covering this term. Each of these case packs contains *all* the material that you need to tackle that subject during that term. Now, for most subjects, the *all* implies that you don't even need a subject-matter text book for the year. However, for a couple of subjects, a supplementary text book is also needed. For this year, I had to buy a book for Accounting and will likely borrow or buy a book for Operations.


Term 1 Case Packs

These case packs contain various reading material including case studies (hence the name 'case' packs). All learning at Cranfield is done at 3 levels over a period of 3 days and this is known as the 3-day cycle.

On day one, you go through the material in your case packs on your own. You reach an understanding of the subject matter and are now ready to discuss the topic with a larger group and this group is your learning team.

So, on day two you discuss the topic with your team members each of whom is also expected to have gone through the case material. The discussions take place either in the morning or in the afternoon depending on when the classes are scheduled. The learning team is fixed for each term and in my case the team consists of 5 members. The typical team size is 6. There is an unwritten policy when it comes to the team composition and that is with respect to the number of women in the team. The team will either have zero female members or two. I guess the reason is to prevent any kind of dominance by the male members over a single woman in the team.
During the learning team discussions wider perspectives over the topic or the case study may emerge and this is quite likely to happen since team members will have different professional and cultural backgrounds. My team has members from the UK, Russia, Pakistan, India and Germany and with professional experiences ranging from 6 to 12 years. So the discussions in the learning team are an absolute value addition.

Day three is when you will have your class session on the topic and are completely ready to explore all aspects of the topic with your stream. The professor leads the discussion and the entire class is expected to participate. Inputs from over 50 students across 8 or 9 teams makes the discussions absolutely lively and interesting. There are in some cases post-reading sessions but they are almost always optional since at the end of the class session i.e., at the end of the day three you are expected to have a very good grasp of the topic on hand.

That's it. That forms the 3-day cycle - learning on your own, then in your learning team and then in your stream. And if you didn't already grasp this by now, each day will typically be a day one for some subjects plus it will be day two for few other subjects plus day three for few more topics. That is, on any given day, I am studying a few topics on my own, discussing a couple of topics with my learning team and in addition sitting through the classes. Fun, isn't it?

My first four weeks at Cranfield

Its been exactly a month since I arrived here at Cranfield. On the one hand it feels like I did the last post only days ago. On the other hand so much has happened since I arrived that it feels like I have been here all the while.

I arrived here on the 22nd of September 2010. My initial idea was to attend the pre-mba maths programme, but I was told on the 21st that I wasn't eligible for the course since I had a fairly decent GMAT score. I had already booked the flight from Karlsruhe-Baden airport to London Stansted, so I decided to nevertheless fly on the 22nd itself. In a way, this turned out to be for the good since it gave me a couple of days to get to know the campus, the surroundings and interact with many others who had already landed arrived on campus.

And what a great time has it been until now! Life at Cranfield started off with the Orientation Week. This is probably the best time one will experience as a complete cohort. As the name indicates, the week was about orienting us in our new environment and was an excellent opportunity to get to know the rest of the cohort. The week is packed with activities and might sometimes even seem a bit overwhelming, but suffice it to say that this is one great week that will stay on my mind forever. It is just amazing how much we managed to get to know each other and how much we achieved as a group in such a short time. And the people who made this so amazing are the students from the last cohort. There are no classes and no professors during this week. Its just us, the newbies, with our guides i.e., the ones who have just undergone the Cranfield experience and who can best explain it to us.
Kudos to Cranfield for devising the orientation week or the O-week, as it is more commonly known. One needs to truly experience the O-week to understand how the mantle of the Cranfield MBA is passed from generation to generation.

There was no time to recover from the O-week. The second week started off bang at 08:45 on Monday morning, the 4th of October (the 'official' start of the academic year), with the lectures. Its just been 3 weeks of lectures but we have covered a great amount of ground in just these 3 weeks. So much so, that the first report submission deadline is already looming close and so is our first WAC (Written Assessment of a Case - more about it once I have personally experienced one).

It had been close to 12 years since I sat in a classroom and one of the fears that I had was whether the lectures would put me to sleep! I couldn't have been more wrong. Each of the lectures, backed with great case studies, has made the class environment absolutely dynamic. I cannot think of any one person in the class who hasn't participated in the discussions so far. And it is also not possible to hide away in the class. Most lecturers cold call on the students and take the pains to ensure that there is a fair balance in the class discussion contributions. No single person is allowed to dominate these discussions.

There is a lot happening already beyond the lectures. Competitions like the AT Kearney Global prize competition, career counselling, workshops for tailoring CVs, applying for jobs (yes, already!), guest speakers and lots more. Different student clubs have already been formed including the consultancy club, the entrepreneurship club and various sports-related groups. But there is one club for which we all automatically become an 'associate member' and that is the 'Social Club'. This is one place which is frequented religiously by the MBAs and as the weeks get tougher, it goes without saying that this will be one club that will rule over all the others - the one club that will bring us and bind us all together.

Cheers!