Innovative Education: Practice makes perfect

By Michael F. Gorman

Michael F. Gorman

When I was a senior at Xavier University working in the university computer center, I happened to answer a misplaced call from Princeton School District in Cincinnati looking for help with database development in their food services area. I hadn’t garnered many practical skills in my theoretical database design course, but being entrepreneurial (and poor), I took the job and obtained faculty approval to combine it with my senior project in computer science. While my fellow students were writing computerized Othello™ games and similar concocted projects, I was building a production database system (and making seven dollars per hour!).

Flash forward to my thesis years at Indiana University, where I was working on labor market forecasting modeling methodologies for my thesis. I took a job at Santa Fe Railway, where I quickly learned that train-scheduling problems were a fertile area of application for operations research. Artificially intelligent search such as genetic algorithms and tabu search were otherworldly until I used them to schedule trains. Thanks to my understanding advisors, my dissertation changed direction; I worked on the answer by day and wrote about the solution methodology by night. A Ph.D. and rail executive was born.

These opportunistic events in my academic career were among my most memorable and valuable learning experiences – allowing me to bridge the gap between my theoretical courses and reality. But they were strictly by happenstance and luck, not built into the design of the academic programs I took.

As my career progressed, I began interviewing recruits into O.R. at BNSF Railway. I met some top students from top schools with excellent grades and technical skills. Yet, in interviews when asked, “How should I decide how many cell phone minutes to buy on my cell phone each month?” they often stammered and stared blankly, unsure how to answer the question.

Despite their technical training, some of these newly minted Ph.D.s and master’s graduates had rarely thought about the broader analytical issues surrounding the application of optimization techniques to the problems they might face on a daily basis. Not being used to facing a problem without the requisite data to solve it, they did not naturally ask clarifying or probing questions to clarify the problem, or explore reasonable assumptions to help move toward a solution. Not only did students sometimes surprisingly fail to recognize the cell phone minutes problem statement as one “to minimize total cost of cell phone ownership subject to the constraint that all minutes must be covered by either bulk minutes payment plan or pay as you go,” but more often could not identify the data needs for solving the problem such as a minutes usage forecast and required sensitivity analysis of the optimal plan cost around that forecast. Of course, there are behavioral issues that could be raised by the interviewee – for example, risk aversion or waste minimization, and organizational issues such as managing to a planned usage once the plan is purchased – but essentially never were. Those who did raise these issues were hired – they recognized how to make the theory work in practice.

Looking back, my fortunate experiences and our applicants’ lack of same helped to shape my perspectives on the value of applied learning. It is not enough to recognize a time space network formulation or know how to make canonical cuts on the unit hypercube. In practice, the problem needs to be clearly identified, the data requirements ferreted out, and the behavioral, change and organizational issues worked through to make the theory work in practice.

Translation to my current teaching philosophy

When I came to the University of Dayton, I was pleased to find a philosophy of “practical wisdom” – the ability to take classroom knowledge and put it into action. Accordingly, in nearly all of the courses I teach, I follow this philosophy by putting the student as close to practical application as possible. For example, sophomore statistics students analyze real-life corporate data, U.S. census demographic data or survey data. Junior process analysis students simulate real-world systems of their choosing, whether airport security, Subway sandwich making or law school application processing. In both cases, students are faced with challenges such as data interpretation and inconsistency reconciliation, making an appropriate (or best possible) assumption and deciding on the level of detail of analysis. They follow a multiple draft process; they write a proposal, share preliminary results and challenges, and only then write the final report. These are subjects that are not generally covered in a textbook; even though a challenge for younger students, the realism of the exercises is both motivating and illuminating.

Most notably in my academic experience, my MIS, OM and DSC department offers the perfect vehicle to experience theory in action for our operations majors – our Operations Capstone Course. Seniors spend six credit hours over six months in teams working on real-world client problems in a consulting environment. Student teams act as senior analysts, taking on ownership of the project; faculty serves as senior partners, providing guidance and quality assurance. The student teams tackle all facets of the consulting project: problem definition, proposal writing, project planning and management, data requirements and gathering, methodological approach determination, expectations management, formal presentation and report writing. More details on the structure of the course can be found in Gorman [1, 2].

Benefits to the Constituencies

I would like to spend the balance of this article discussing the benefits of field study to participating faculty, discipline, school and university that result from a successful capstone course. I will also provide some thoughts on how to make such field consulting courses work.

Students: First and foremost, the students gain from hands-on application of skills. Students learn that there are no “pure” operations problems, optimization problems or forecasting problems. In each case, multiple disciplines, areas of the organization and tool skills are required to address the problem holistically. As an advisor, I came to appreciate the students’ proactive behavior as they recognized the technical needs of the project and came to me for additional training. They also learned that technical skills alone were not enough; they learned to blend their analysis with an understanding of the client’s culture and strategy to create actionable recommendation. These benefits are difficult to generate in a classroom setting; when surveyed about the best, most helpful and memorable aspects of the course, students mentioned “real world” in almost 25 percent of the written comments [2].

One student commented: “With the OPS Capstone we are working with real-world companies and real-world expectations and scenarios. It gives us a chance to see all the variables that go into decision-making other than what is taught in the classroom. Solutions may be optimal, but when you realize the amount of employee discipline that must go into the solution it may actually render it obsolete.”

Clients: Our corporate clients benefit in numerous ways. Generally, our clients (who, of course, also coach student teams) enjoy supporting local higher education. This interaction also gives clients access to high-quality, professor-led projects at no cost. Of course, after extensive interaction with students, many companies make offers to students on their teams; the projects act as a six-month-long interview and a great source of candidates. An executive at American Trim told me they hired students from the first two consulting agreements “after seeing the impressive skill sets exhibited through the workings and presentations.” But the most direct benefit is savings generated from our projects; clients have verified $4 million in savings based on student projects concerning inventory reduction, overtime savings, reduced transportation costs, reduced setups, reduced setup times and the like [1].

As stated by the director of operational quality at Miami Valley Hospital in Dayton, “They were students at the time but produced better results for our hospital than some paid consultants.”
Faculty: The Capstone experience is clearly done for the client and the students. As an instructor, I have found the course delivers a number of benefits to me as well (beyond getting paid!). First, it gives me a wealth of examples to draw from as I teach lower-level courses. I’m amazed by the level of credibility that arises from talking about a project the seniors just did last year using “exactly this” approach. It also allows me to focus on the tools that I know will be most useful to students when they are seniors (and when they graduate) because I have regular, ongoing experience with what is so often used in practice. In a few cases, I have opportunistically built new research streams or helped extend and validate others via student projects, resulting in a few publications in Interfaces and consulting projects extending from student projects and vice versa [3,4,5].
Institution: The Capstone has generated considerable value to the institution as well. The University of Dayton encourages serving the community and the capstone does that by providing value to the local business community. It also helps build recognition for our program amongst local and regional businesses. As a result of how well received the project course is, the University of Dayton this year announced the creation of the Center for Project Excellence to further improve and extend our project course offerings.

Recipe for Success

The projects themselves are perhaps the most critical ingredient in the recipe for success for a field project course. Faculty must be actively engaged in defining a project that is not only manageable in a six-month time frame but also meaningful in terms of total work content, level of academic rigor and of practical importance to the client. The client must provide a “front burner” project – not some cutesy academic research exercise that is “just for the kids.” The importance of the project to the client directly affects their interest in the results and their corresponding responsiveness. It also greatly motivates the students when their project is real, meaningful and results matter a great deal to the client.

Four distinct groups contribute to the course: school, faculty, student and client. First, the academic institution and department must value practical knowledge to support such resource-intensive and nontraditional courses. We have found the maximum number of students one faculty member can effectively manage is about 18, so class sizes are necessarily small and more costly. The institution must avoid bureaucratic and administrative barriers in order for the projects to flourish.

Second, faculty must be dedicated to the course; I often say it is the hardest class I love to teach. As soon as a semester is over I am beginning the quest for the next year’s projects. Faculty must be flexible, multitalented, ambitious and risk-taking. There are no yellowed lecture notes here – every semester is a new set of problems to tackle with the students; I tell the students that I don’t know the answers – in fact, I don’t even know the questions! Faculty with practical industry or consulting experience is extremely helpful to dealing with “the real world.”

Third, collaborative corporate contacts are essential for identifying and facilitating field study projects. Clients must be actively engaged in projects and demanding of students, but responsive and willing to spend time with the student team to allow them to be successful.

Finally, students must be well trained in technical and broad-based business skills. More than just “solving the problem,” they must be able to manage expectations, communicate and persuade, and organize themselves and their teams in order to conduct a large-scale project. Of course, some of these skills are gained during this course, but prior projects such as the ones described earlier in this article, internships and the like are very helpful for students entering into a large-scale project.

These five factors come together to create an all-around successful experience for all participants. The University of Dayton and my MIS, OM and DSC department are well recognized; faculty are engaged and respected; clients are financially better off. But most of all, students are emboldened, empowered and motivated to use their training in their future careers.

Michael Gorman is a professor at the University of Dayton and president of MFG Consulting, Inc. He has 10 years of experience in the rail industry. He has been a finalist in the Edelman and Wagner competitions and won the INFORMS Award for the Teaching of OR/MS Practice. He can be reached at Michael.gorman@udayton.edu.

References

1. Gorman, Michael F., 2010, “The University of Dayton Operations Management Capstone Course: Undergraduate Student Field Consulting Applies Theory to Practice,” Interfaces, Vol. 40, No. 6, pp. 432-443.
2. Gorman, Michael F., 2011, “Student Reactions to the Field Consulting Capstone Course in Operations Management at the University of Dayton,” forthcoming in Interfaces.
3. Gorman, M. F., Hoff, J., Kinion, R., (2009, “Tales from the Front: Lean Case Studies Indicate that You Can Have too Much of a Good Thing,” Interfaces, Vol. 39, No. 6, pp. 540-548.
4. Ahire, S. A., Gorman, M. F., Dwiggens, D., Mudrey, O., 2007, “Operations Research Helps Reshape Operations Strategy at Standard Register Company,” Interfaces, Vol. 37. No. 6, pp. 553-565.
5. Gorman, M. F., Ahire, S., 2006, “A Major Appliance Manufacturer Rethinks its Inventory Policies for Service Vehicles,” Interfaces, Vol. 36, No. 5, pp. 407-419 (2005 Wagner Award finalist).