JohnIt’s been awhile since I’ve updated my blog, but I’ve been pretty busy with school and work; both areas of my life have seem to require more dedicated time in comparison to pre-covid. School seems like we’re still trying to transition into teaching and learning in this new environment we live in. Work seems like there’s no time off because of the needs of the customers. Although, I have to admit, post-normal business hour work has decreased, but school seems like it is never-ending. Even so, I successfully made it through two more classes for my MBA program and I wanted to write a bit about each class.
Advanced Software Engineering
This is probably one of the best lectured classes about programming that I have ever taken because it relates exactly to the real-world. The class revolved around what it takes to start and complete an enterprise-level project – without going into the coding aspect. It removes the black curtain between the different levels of abstractions from the CEO of a company – down to the developer that is writing the code.
There were many topics that were covered, however, the few ones I found most insightful and relatable were the Zachman Framework and documentation.
Zachman Framework
The Zachman Framework is a table structure that can be filled out to help lay out the requirements from the different perspectives of a standard company; such as the CEO or at the architect level. By traversing through each cell and filling out each part at the beginning of a project, it leaves little room for gaps that may arise during the actual project.
Though I’ve never used it in a job, I see incredible benefits in using variations of it. I have found that by removing walls and having the transparency in a project from the perspective of others, it can make a project run more smooth because everyone can see how the requirements translate as you go down into the lower levels. I think the lecture on this was incredibly help to show how easy it is for a project to fail or run behind when there are questions or problems that may appear later on in a project.
Documentation
This part of the class was a no brainer. I think the professor really enforced the need for documentation for maintainability, supportability, knowledge transfer, and confirmation. Another big that that was conveyed was that not all of the documentation needed to be done up front or at once. From an agile perspective, you only know so much some time, so trying to document things that you don’t know about is literally impossible and could be a complete waste of time.
A sub-part of the documentation lectures that I thought was really beneficial was the standardization of documentation. Not only does standardization of documentation make it easy to browse for information, but it makes it easier to document because people already have an idea or a pattern to follow when developing; it leaves out the guessing game of what needs to be documented.
Operations Management
This course was taught by one of my favorite professors at UM-Flint. The class went over the inner workings of technology and human interactions for operations management. We went over a number of different topics such as process analysis, quality management, forecasting, inventory management, lean operations, and project management. Though it was a lot of work, I found forecasting to intrigue me the most.
Forecasting
Forecasting was incredibly interesting to me because from what I gathered, it could just be a complete waste of time. Regardless, utilizing the different forecasting methods was enlightening as to how complex forecasting can be. The methods we focused on were time-series and casual (regression), where we focused on five components: horizontal, trend, seasonal, cyclical, and random. Based on those components, it would help determine what is expected of the forecast. Also, within the trend realm, we often looked at the regression equation Yt = a + b(T) to fit values. In tandem with that, we used different methods such as exponential smoothing and Holt’s method to determine forecasting values.
Though taking the two classes together was very time-intensive, I did learn a lot and was able to apply what I learned into my workplace pretty quick. If I had any constructive criticism about the courses, I would say the deliverable due dates in each class were a little confusing. Trying to plan when to do school-work, submit homework, and manage regular job-work became a little hard because of how I needed to stagger the times. I also found that even though you may have an amazing professor, there is a huge factor of your experience that depends on other students. If you have a class where students are quiet and don’t put themselves out there, especially in case study organized classes, it can make it hard to have deep, meaningful conversations. Having said all that, I enjoyed this semester. I am looking more forward to my last 4 classes for the rest of the year.
Wish me luck!