Coming Fall 2019 | MBA 590 Course Offerings

“Designed to help you introspect and enumerate your career goals over an 8-week period”

The MBA 590 courses are a must for every student planning to obtain an MBA. Effective professionals in all fields demonstrate expertise beyond their academic training. They develop this expertise through experience, exposure to new situations, and awareness of the demands of the environment. These courses are designed to prepare students to successfully navigate and transition into new professional opportunities. The MBA 590 courses offer a wide variety of exposure to dynamic and critical skills in today’s corporate environment. Interested students should contact their advisor for more information, and consider registering for these courses in the Fall 2019 semester.

Project Management, Wednesday 8/28 – 10/18  Instructor: James Treleaven

This course provides an introduction to the project management discipline and, specifically, to the concepts that are covered in the test that is part of the Project Management Professional (PMP) certification process. The course will focus on real-world cases to provide the necessary knowledge and build the foundational skills for students to be able to participate effectively in projects and, ultimately, to manage them effectively.  It covers management techniques for all stages in a project from initiation through execution, and students will be exposed to all aspects of projects – from project planning and status reporting through risk management and appropriate communications with team members as well as stakeholders.

Applied Consulting, Wednesday 10/21-12/6  Instructor: John Fyfe

The Applied Consulting course is an introduction to the client-consultant engagement process typically used by consulting and professional services firms. Students who aspire to go into the consulting industry will particularly benefit from this course, as will those who intend to serve as an internal consultant or operations analyst within any public or private sector organization. The course will introduce frameworks and methods for designing, developing, implementing, and evaluating client engagements. The course integrates principles from various disciplines including strategic planning, project, program and operations management, and others.

Improvisation & Leadership II, Tuesday 8/26 to 10/18  Instructor: Michael Popowits

Executive presence is a combination of verbal and non-verbal abilities that are recognized as a

poised, authentic communication style, particularly in spontaneous or impromptu interactions.

Business managers can profit greatly from training in -spontaneous, creative communication and improvisational theater techniques. This course highlights the practice sessions on prepared speeches, impromptu speaking, deep dives into the proper use of presentation software, and then practice visually effective, emotionally intelligent powerpoint use.

Web Analytics, Monday 10/21-12/6  Instructor: Doug Lundquist

Modern firms rely heavily on the Internet to promote their products. Web analytics gathers and processes browsing behavior to learn more about their customers. Web analytics offers a source of competitive advantage for both gaining new customers and keeping existing ones. This course will introduce students to the fundamentals of web analytics. Students will learn to use Google’s online and offline software tools. The course will emphasize how these tools help inform marketing decisions. Course topics include:

• Key concepts and terms and their usage
• Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and their importance
• Visitor behavior analysis
• Developing and aligning KPIs with strategic objectives

Social Entrepreneurs Leading Change, Tuesday 10/21-12/06  Instructor: Anna Lloyd

This course focuses on the integration of social enterprise tools into a traditional business curriculum, an essential component of a business school curriculum. This eight-week course looks at integrative leadership, the development of business skills with a focus on public policy and philanthropy, which support cross-boundary, multi-sector entrepreneurship and enhance our ability to build teams and attract investment.

Creating Careers That Count, Tuesday 8/26 – 10/19  Instructor: Bridget E. O’Connell

In a highly dynamic, well-educated, and globally competitive marketplace, relevance has replaced loyalty as a basis for relationships—which includes the contract between employee and employer.  Since the marketplace dictates what is relevant, careers are freely created as long as it counts for the marketplace.  This eight-week course will explore the three steps to creating a career that counts for you and for the marketplace:

• Defining difference-making strategy
• Discovering marketplace relevance
• Demonstrating and delivering difference-making capability with highly relevant impact

Business Data For Decision Making, Tuesday 10/21-12/06  Instructor: Murad Gharibeh

The tools of statistics and data analysis are increasingly more important for business managers, and this course is designed to provide tools needed both for MBA studies and in addressing analytical challenges in the workplace.  The course covers basic tools of statistics:  distributions and relationships, probability and sampling distributions,  hypothesis testing, regression, etc. In working with data analysis, it covers collecting and organizing data, sorting distractions from the truth, finding meaningful patterns, drawing conclusions and predict the future, and presenting findings.

Managing Entrp. Data & Analytics, Tuesday 10/21- 12/06  Instructor: Kyle Cheek
With the appearance of Tom Davenport’s article Competing on Analytics in 2006 analytics began to quickly evolve from a backroom practice to a core strategic competency for many organizations. Now over a decade into the era of analytic competition, many businesses are fully invested in analytics as a competitive differentiator but still lack a clear understanding of best practices to guide adoption and governance. This course considers models of analytics governance and the intersection with other more familiar governance regimes (like data governance and information governance).