ISSUES IN EDUCATION

By Michael F. Gorman

In recent years, business school education in general – and operations research and management science education in particular – have been criticized as deficient in providing students with the practical, relevant education employers seek.

Bennis and O’Toole [1] challenged the practical relevance of U.S. business education this way: “Too focused on ‘scientific’ research, business schools are hiring professors with limited real-world experience and graduating students who are ill equipped to wrangle with complex, unquantifiable issues.”

With respect to OR/MS, Thomas Grossman [2] reported, “The traditional model- and algorithm-based course fails to meet the needs of MBA programs and students.” Similarly, Monmohan and Tang [3] suggest that if teaching, research and practice become disengaged, OR/MS is in danger of becoming a niche field.

Field Studies: An opportunity for OR/MS

The University of Dayton undergraduate Operations Management faculty has developed a field study-based capstone course that provides students with an appreciation for the application of O.R. theory in practice.

The senior-level capstone course is a one-credit hour course on problem definition and proposal writing, followed by a five-credit hour project execution phase. The course allows students to function as consultants with real-world clients, allowing them to see the relevance of the skills by demonstrating them in practice. My other articles [4, 5, 6] describe the course in more detail, reporting that the course is well received by students, beneficial for clients, and advantageous for faculty and institution. This article focuses on the advantages of field study for the OR/MS discipline.

Developing more complete and sophisticated understanding of O.R. in action

The problem: Students learn that success in an O.R. project is more than merely “solving the problem.” Through the field study, students hone their skills in problem definition by identifying relevant and irrelevant factors for their projects. At the same time, students must develop the soft skills, such as interviewing, that they need to solicit accurate information. They learn to listen to their intuition in order to identify root causes and detect inconsistencies, while ferreting out misinformation and disinformation. They learn the role assumptions play in substituting for better information. O.R. can only guarantee optimality to the problem as stated; in a field study, students are forced to define the problem accurately.

As one student reported, “The capstone project taught me to fully understand a problem and how that problem is related to the other moving parts, before trying to apply a solution.”

The tool: As reported by Grossman [2], students too often perceive OR/MS as a collection of disparate tools. Field studies force a broader view of OR/MS skills in the context of the analytics process. Field studies offer ill-structured problems that do not fit neatly into specific O.R. modeling paradigms. Students learn that there isn’t always a tool that perfectly applies; they learn to employ a concert of descriptive, predictive and prescriptive tools in concert to develop more accurate and valuable insights.

A student commented, “You learn that at a certain point, all the analysis in the world won’t necessarily solve the problem. You shouldn’t get too fancy trying to use the ‘tools’ at the expense of a simple logical solution.”

The answer: In a field experience, students realize they do not “find the answer,” but rather they propose possible courses of action that are realistic and actionable for their client, including the client-specific qualitative and quantitative benefits of their O.R.-based recommendation. Finally, students experience the influence of client expectations, corporate culture and resistance to change that affect how their recommendations are received and applied – and subsequently affect how close they come to reaching their predicted “optimal” results.

One student related, “It was very interesting to hear the different perspectives and the different levels of commitment to the initiative. The course was an important lesson on organizational culture, office politics and textbook theory meeting the cold hard facts of reality.”

The impact: As pointed out by Carraway and Clyman [7], a key for the future of OR/MS is in establishing and maintaining managerial relevance. Through field study, the student and client come to better understand and appreciate the value of OR/MS through its application and delivery of actual business value.

A student reported, “It was an awesome feeling to know that we identified a significant business issue and were able to select an appropriate, value-adding solution to our client and work with them to meet their expectations.”

Risks and Rewards: Field studies are messy… as they should be!

Live projects have inherent risks, including scope, data quality, client responsiveness, tool applicability and project value. Perhaps because field studies have many uncontrollable factors, OR/MS faculty might avoid them, but this is exactly why they should be embraced. The unstructured, confusing, messy nature of field projects is exactly what makes the projects a rich learning experience and an invaluable contribution to the education of a well-rounded graduate. Certainly project risk should be mitigated and anticipated as much as possible, but it can’t be (shouldn’t be!) eliminated. Students must be assured that they are not graded on uncontrollable things that happen, but rather on how professionally they deal with and adapt to the unexpected and how well they deliver results despite the challenges.

The University of Dayton celebrates and encourages what we call “practical wisdom” – the ability to take classroom knowledge and put it into action. By sending students into the field to test the skills and knowledge they have gained in the classroom, the operations management capstone regularly demonstrates to students and to experienced practitioners the practical value of OR/MS techniques. I encourage other programs to actively pursue a similar path for the good of their students and the discipline.

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 is deputy editor for Interfaces and the Management Science – Management Insights editor. He has been a finalist in the Edelman and Wagner competitions and has won the INFORMS Award for the Teaching of OR/MS Practice. He can be reached at Michael.gorman@udayton.edu.

References

1. Bennis, Warren G., and James O’Toole, 2005, “How business schools lost their way,” Harvard Business Review, Vol. 83, No. 5, pp. 96-104.
2. Grossman, Thomas, 2001, “Causes of the Decline of the Business School Management Science Course,” Informs Transactions on Education, Vol. 1, No. 2., pp. 51-61.
3. Manmohan, Sodhi, Byung-Gak Son and Christopher Tang, 2008, “The OR/MS Ecosystem: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats,” Operations Research, Vol. 56, No. 2, pp. 267-277.
4. 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.
5. Gorman, Michael F., 2011, “Student Reactions to the Field Consulting Capstone Course in Operations Management at the University of Dayton,” forthcoming in Interfaces.
6. Gorman, Michael F., 2011, “Practice Makes Perfect: Learning by doing in field consulting course benefits students, clients and faculty,” OR/MS Today, August.
7. Carraway, Robert L., and Dana R. Clyman, 1997, “Managerial Relevance: The Key to Survival for OR/MS,” Interfaces, Vol. 27, No. 6, pp. 115-130.