A Tale of Four Projects

So I've been done with my classes for about 3 weeks now, but I still want to document what consumed so much of my time over the past four months.  I'm just a little delayed.....

This past semester I took four classes, and each class had a group project.  Each project took pretty much the entire semester to complete.  One thing I learned was that when you are taking four classes and working, it is hard to find time to have group meetings.  I had several group meetings on Sunday nights and Saturdays.

Ethics
In our ethics class we were required to pick any controversial topic to present.  My group, with much encouragement from me, chose to research and present The Cost of Obesity in America.  I am incredibly interested in this topic so enjoyed the research.  One video we showed was actually a piece ABC Nightline did on the cost of obesity, and the piece was filmed at UAB.  You should watch it, but it will not allow me to embed it so, click HERE to see it.

Project Management
For a project management class, this class was not very well managed!  It was very difficult for us to even figure out what our project was.  This is probably the least noteworthy project of the 4 so I won't say much except that there was a lot of work that went in to completing all the materials necessary for a simulated project.

Social Media
This was an incredibly interesting class and very relevant.  Each group was assigned a real company to work with.  My group worked with a company that was designing a social media game that would based on Facebook (think farmville or mafia wars).  This game is a baseball game and has real-world rewards that include meeting former baseball players such as Dave Winfield.  Our job was to figure out why no one would invest in the game, recommend what changes should be made to attract investors, and research potential investors.  After much research, our group determined that this game had waited too long to get on the market.  If it had been released 2 years ago when it was developed, there was chance for success.  However, in those two years there are many more social games and some that involve baseball.  In fact, just in April 2011 alone 3 baseball social media games were released.  We felt these would really make it difficult for our game to compete, even with our game having real-world rewards.

One of these games, Sega Play! Baseball was similar to our game but was a little more cartoon like.  We felt it would be as competitive with our game.

However, World Series Superstars was absolutely everything our game was and wanted to be.  When I found it, I was like "guys this is our game."  Every recommendation we had made to change our game was already occurring in this game.  We basically felt this game would make it difficult for our game to be successful.

Business Strategy
This is the capstone class for the MBA program.  We choose a real company, analyze their business, and develop and present a business plan for them.  It is quite the project!  Our business plan ended up being 66 pages long (and was quite expensive to get printed/bound at Kinkos since there was color on every page).
My group chose to do a business plan for Alabama Outdoors in Homewood.  We met with the GM and Operating Partner several times.  Alabama Outdoors actually came under new ownership about a year ago.  This new ownership is doing some really great things especially in the areas of customer service and inventory.  This was an incredibly interesting project since in creating our business plan we used things we had learned from all of our previous classes.

  So there you have it... what I was up to from January-April.