Case Based Learning CRIB Sheet

A process view for organising case based learning (aka problem based learning); to formulate self-defined and self-directed learning goals.  Cases can be analysed at progressively deeper levels, from simple to more complex and/or subtle analysis as you become adept at this approach to learning.

With respect to the cases, you will get out as much as you put in. Consider using the following process and prompts.

• Case analysis process guide:
• Read the case
• Identify what you already know about a topic. 
• Develop a list of potential problems evident in the case.
• State learning gaps then resolve them by finding and reading-up relevant material.
• Summarise your findings and ideas.
• Generate a synthesis.
• Present a single page capturing the above (homework).
• Retrospective (reflect on the process).
• Case analysis self-question prompts:
• Are there topics/objects in the case you need to know more about?
• Do you have applicable prior learning and experience you can bring in?
• Did the case raise questions for you? How did you answer the questions?
• Is information presented that you do not understand? Avoid highlighting non-specific generalised experience/skill gaps that you cannot address through independent research and learning.
• How did you resolve your personal knowledge gap(s)?
• Our intention is for you to show that you started to address the knowledge gap here. So, what did you learn?  
• Any general benefit? Is the case applicable to inform future practice?
• Are your recommendations, prescriptions, statements or claims justifiable?

Exercise: Global Pharma (case)

Exercise: 15"

Read the case (again): 5"

In groups assess the suitability of one of the following areas for a pharmaceutical firm's sourcing strategy...

• Email
• ERP
• MRP
• HR
• LIMS
• Plant control systems
• Public/market/marketing content management websites
• Internal documentation and content management intranets
• Storage
• Collaboration technology
• Logistics (3PL)
• Regulatory compliance

Applying one or more of the instruments from chapter 2 to this example.

Debrief: 15"

Report to the class…

• Service categories: General Business / Unit or Site Specific (HR, Finance etc) / Industry Specific
• 
  
• Strategy recommendation?
• 
  
• Cloud? / In-House? / On-Shore? / Off-Shore? / 3rd Party? /

Term-Paper presentation peer-assessment...

Consider using the following criteria for peer-assessing the presentation.

Criteria 1: Motivation

0 = Unclear what drove this research or why it may be important.
1 = Motivation: You can clearly identify 'why' they studied this particular problem and 'why' it may be important.
2 = Clear motivation, plus they clearly identified the problems(s) by initial analysis and/or presented extant knowledge, current hypotheses, and identified gaps in knowledge.

Critera 2: Data

0 = Unclear what research data was gathered or why what was done is relevant.
1 = Data through discovery: They have shown that they have independently researched the problem area(s)
2 = Discovery is evident AND the research data gathered convincingly addresses the problem area, that is, the kind of data gathered is likely to yield insights that may address the problem area.

Criteria 3: Analysis

0 = Unclear how findings or recommendations were arrived at.
1 = Findings are analysed cogently and convincingly; convincing arguments for arriving at findings.
2 = Findings AND responses developed in context of prior knowledge. Synthesis built on findings – clearly addresses the problem(s) and integrates learning from others.

Criteria 4: Engagement/Impact

0 = Very difficult to comprehend, understand, read, hear, etc. I would not watch this presentation again.
1 = A competent presentation, well organised with suitable and meaningful appropriate content.
2 = A really excellent and convincing presentation that conveys clear messages, for example effectively using images, dialogue, humour, shock etc. I would watch it again and encourage others to watch it.

---

Alternative presentation assessment rubric 

Threshold requirement: Originality and own work; Others' ideas graphics and quotes properly cited, acknowledged and referenced (No Plagarism!).
Equal weighting applied to the following:

1. Argument demonstrates analytical skills. I was convinced by the evidence and the argument.
2. Message and conclusions give evidence of reflective thinking and deep engagement with an advanced research topic. I received a clear convincing take-away message.
3. Overall impression: Is piece competent and polished? Has producer showcased their domain knowledge and professionalism.

Issues for distributed teams

The following survey aims to establish the level of knowledge and experience of virtual teams and their supporting tool-technology combinations among the survey group. The survey is an adaptation of the one carried out by the Economist Intelligence Unit in the report "Managing virtual teams Taking a more strategic approach" in 2009.

• What are the primary challenges of managing a virtual team?
• What are most important for creating a successful virtual team?
• What device-and-tool combinations do you regularly use to communicate and collaborate with your virtual team?
• How often do members of your virtual team meet face-to-face?
• Which of the following best represents the amount of time you spend working within virtual team(s), as opposed to local/physical teams?

Click here to take survey

Exercise: It's important to talk about Ethics because...

Ethics discussion keywords

Goal: To explore the meaning of ethics within and between organisations.
Preparatory reading (optional): 

• Carr, Albert (1968). Is business bluffing ethical? Harvard Business Review, Jan.8Feb, 143, 155. 
• Kavanagh, Donncha (2011) 'Work and play in management studies: A Kleinian analysis'. Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization, 11 (4), 336–356

Exercise workshop/debrief

Steps:

1. Write the following keywords on the board. This can be done in advance or as an 'icebreaker' with the class. For instance, ask the class why we have included the concept of 'GAME'.
• Ethics
• Responsibility
• Moral
• Ethos
• Play
• Regulation
• Rules
• Safe
• Values
• Winners
• What matters?
• Game
• Sustainable
• Interests
• Self-interests
• Power
• Barriers
• Welfare
• "it's important to talk about ethics because..."
2. After this ask groups to discuss further and to create their own response to the opening sentence "It's important to talk about Ethics because..."
3. Visit each table to ensure the discussions commence, encourage and highlight. Allow 5' to 10' for this phase.
4. Give a 2' warning that each group must debrief to the rest of the class. Groups may present one or two different positions, possibly contrasting.
5. Groups state to the rest of the class their interpretation and reasoning. Allow wider discussion. The lecturer can interject and 'characterise'. The tone will shift between serious and playful.

Notes:
After the discussion ask groups or individuals if they are willing to be photographed for the "Let's talk about ethics" initiative. Volunteers will need to sign the 'Photography Release Form'.

Indeed some of this year's class did elect to take part in the "Let's talk about ethics" initiative at UCD launched by President of Ireland Michael D. Higgins (link). Slideshow below.

Prepare research papers "as if" to submit to ICIS 2015

Exercise: Prepare a first draft using whatever you have (in shared folder here)
Pointers on structure and grading criteria here.

ICIS 2015 call for papers is online (see http://icis2015.aisnet.org).

The 2015 conference theme is “Exploring the Information Frontier.”
Research tracks include:

• Conference Theme Track: Exploring the Information Frontier
• Breakout Ideas in IS
• Decision Analytics and Support
• E-Business and E-Government
• Economics and Value of IS
• General IS Topics
• Human Behavior in IS
• Human-Computer Interaction
• IS Curriculum and Education
• IS Design and Business Process Management
• IS Governance and Control
• IS in Healthcare
• IS Security and Privacy
• IS Strategy and Organizational Impacts
• IS Theory Development and Use
• IT Adoption and Use
• Managing IS Projects and IS Development
• Methodological and Philosophical Foundations of IS
• Panels
• Practice-oriented Research
• Social Media and Digital Collaborations
• Sustainability and Societal Impacts of IS

Conference Co Program Chairs are: Cathy Urquhart, Armin Heinzl and Traci Carte

Exercise: What is (out)sourcing? Part 1

(this is also an icebreaker to encourage participation in a large lecture theatre environment)

Goal
Come up with a working definition of sourcing and outsourcing.

Instructions
1. Ask members of the class to define sourcing and outsourcing or give examples of global sourcing. (3 minutes)
2. Write down and display this list of definitions and examples.

Definitions

• "Outsourcing is the procurement of goods and services from external suppliers" (Mol, 2007)
• "Sourcing is the act through which work is contracted or delegated to an external or internal entity that could be physically located anywhere." (Oshri et. al, 2009)
• "Outsourcing is defined as contracting with a third service provider for the management and completion of a certain amount of work, for a specified length of time, cost, and level of service." (Oshri et. al, 2009)
• ...
• ...

Examples

• ...
• ...
• ...
• ...

Comments
There are no wrong answers, just build up a list, tabulate and provide back to the class

Definitions offered (edited) by each group (2015)

References:
Mol, M.J. Outsourcing: Design, Process and Performance Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Oshri, I., Kotlarsky, J., and Willcocks, L.P. The Handbook of Global Outsourcing and Offshoring Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, p. 266.

Footnote
The lecturer then makes a bold statement that in fact, these academic definitions are WRONG!
Follow up with the second part of this exercise with "What is (out)sourcing? Part 2". Possibly 2 or 3 weeks later.

Exercise: Egypt as an ideal OOS location

Exercise: 
In groups (~10 min)
Identify 2-3 key advantages of Egypt
Identify 2-3 key disadvantages of Egypt

Classroom discussion (~15min)

In light of these advantages and disadvantages, what type of work would you outsource or offshore to Egypt?

Thinking outside the box, what other destinations would you consider?

Summary of responses:

For:
Young working population 82M
Low cost of labour
Proximity to Europe
Language skills (multi-lingual)
Good exchange rates
IT infrastructure
Good numbers of knowledge workers
Corporation tax 25%
Open culture (high level of tolerance)

Against:
IT infrastructure
Unstable political landscape *
Lack of monetary supports for new business
Cultural conflict *
Corruption in government *
Climate conditions
Low standards of living for many
Low economic growth
Gender inequality
Unclear corporate policy environment for business

Other comments:
Suitable for the following kinds of business
Financial, accounting and HR
Manufacturing
Call centres and customer support
Technology R&D
Translation
BPO
Content providers
Law and legal services

Tech R&D requires: good infrastructure, low risk, low cost and good IPR protections

Exercise: national factors

Categories to consider:

• Skills
• Cost
• IT Infrastructure
• Risk
• Quality
• Local market
• Economy
• Location (geographic)
• Culture
• Political

For country E.

Issues:

• Cultural-politics
• Unhelpful govt. attitude to business
• Climate
• Time zone (wrt North America)
• Risk of disruptive events
• Corruption
• Illiteracy rate
• Education system
• Inconsistent IT capabilities in different cities

Positives:

• Skilled labour force, multi-lingual
• Low cost
• Smart village initiative
• Workers willing to work overtime
• World class telecommunications infrastructure (where it is available)
• Access to Europe, Middle East, North Africa
• Easy business environment
• Timezone same as some major markets
• Gateway to Middle East
• Tax breaks in special hub zones.

Exercise: Experiences on virtual teams

Exercise: Establish the level of knowledge and experience of virtual teams and their supporting tool-technology combinations among the survey group.

The following survey is an adaptation of the one carried out by the Economist Intelligence Unit in the report "Managing virtual teams Taking a more strategic approach" from 2009.

Click here to take survey

Do virtual teams perform better?

In early 2013 Yahoo hit the tech headlines by changing its workplace policy and placing a ban on teleworking (link). On the other hand the 2013 winners of the DARPA FANG Challenge were a team of three who had never met before collaborating on their proposal (link).

Do virtual teams perform better or worse than collocated teams, or what about teams that meet intermittently or partially? This is a really interesting question.

On the one hand common knowledge understanding (and research) overwhelmingly states that face to face contact is an essential component for effective distributed teamwork. On the other hand, a narrowly focused and relatively sparse body of research has highlighted a number of cases where high performance, multidisciplinary, virtual teams completely outperform in-house teams e.g. (Malhotra, 2001).

J. Mike Smith has also noted the experiences in pharmaceutical R&D projects, where small, distributed, virtual, multidisciplinary teams exceed the performance of the traditional in-house projects (link).

"Performance of the virtual teams within the portfolio companies has not gone unnoticed, as potential partners to the these virtual team portfolio companies have marveled at the work. When presenting results of proof of concept studies to a potential partner, the CEO of a potential partnering company noted “It would take three times as many people and twice as long to achieve these results in my organization”."

What tools, or technological infrastructure enable high performance virtual teams? One way of anticipating or evaluating these tools ahead of their potential adoption in mainstream IT enabled organisations is to assess their development and uptake within the emblematic knowledge intense virtualised digital media production industry, software engineering. The provision of technologies by software developers to support distributed software development has ended up having wider application in mainstream industries. For example source code control systems have been adapted for general versioned document control. The 'comment' feature for source code commits percolated into web pages and Blogs and has ultimately defined the basic functionality of microblogging services like Twitter. Wiki's comprise an entire subculture of the editable web and gave the impetus for the Through The Web (TTW) editing function in all other Content Management Systems (CMSs). SMS originated as an engineered test application on early GSM phones. Feature applications like conversational technology and email, in use since the dawn of the internet, are now general services for wider populations.

Technological Infrastructure

The following products and services represent a snapshot of such key technologies today. In no particular order:

Functional communication services and devices (largely standalone elements)
email
fixed phone
mobile phone
SMS
instant messaging
blog/microblogs
any CMS
http://www.skype.com/en/
File and document versioning systems (for managing/storing finished product)
https://github.com/
http://dropbox.com/
http://drive.google.com

High Tech design and visualisation tools
https://pidoco.com/
http://www.balsamiq.com/
http://www.sketchup.com/


Work-task-systems (largely standalone elements for coordinating, communicating)
http://www.planningpoker.com/
http://cardmapping.com/ and/or http://www.cardboardit.com/
https://trello.com/
http://teambox.com/
https://podio.com/
Integrated enterprise functional systems (ERP, CRM, Issue Tracking etc)
http://basecamp.com/
https://jira.atlassian.com/
http://www.mantisbt.org/
http://www.x2engine.com/
http://www.sugarcrm.com/
http://www.sap.com/
http://www.salesforce.com/
SNS (social network service) and/or Integrated enterprise communication environments
http://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/sametime/
http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/
http://www.facebook.com/

Reference: Malhotra, A., Majchrzak, A., Carman, R. & Lott, V. (2001) Radial Innovation Without Collocation: A Case Study at Boeing-Rocketdyne. MIS Quarterly, 25, 229-49.
Further reading: Consider the controversy that erupted in 2013 when Yahoo's Marissa Mayer ordered an end to `remote' work. How did employees react? Did the ban stand the test of time? What other drivers could have motivated it? (the original `leak' on AllThingsD)

Exercise: What is Crowdsourcing?

Goal
Come up with a working definition of crowdsourcing.

Comments
Can be run in groups or as class exercise with someone writing up definitions and examples on blackboard. There are no wrong answers, just build up a list, tabulate and provide back to the class

Instructions
1. Ask members of the class to brainstorm the meaning of crowdsourcing. (3 minutes)
2. Write down and display this list of definitions and examples.

Definitions
Quotes below from (Howe, 2008).

"Crowdsourcing isn't a single strategy. It's an umbrella term for a highly varied group of approaches that share one obvious attribute in common: they all depend on some contribution from the crowd."

"A community that forms around a shared interest, shared passion, hobby, craft"
"When a company takes something that was once performed by employees and outsources in the form of an open call to a large group of undefined group of people, generally using the internet"

"Crowdsourcing is Wikipedia with 'everything'"

...
...

Examples
...
...
...
...

References:

• Howe, J. (2008) Crowdsourcing: Why the power of the crowd is driving the future of business.
• Crowd-sourced gamers advance AIDS research (link) By Ben Coxworth, 16:45 September 20, 2011

Exercise: Sourcing Concepts - Word Association

Sourcing Concepts - Word Association

What is sourcing?

Consider the following words and concepts associated with sourcing activities and outsourcing industry:

Outsourcing & Economic Development
Managing Distance/Time
Managing Cross-cultural Issues
Managing Knowledge Transfer
The Politics of Outsourcing
Sourcing Models
Offshoring
Offshore Outsourcing
Near Shoring
Crowd Sourcing
Open Source
Captive Centres
Supplier/Customer/Client
Life Cycle
Multi-Sourcing
Service Providers
Cloud Sourcing
In-Sourcing
Trust
Commodity
Capability
Communication
ASP's (Application Service Providers)
Backsourcing (insourcing)
BPO & Nearshoring
Sea sourcing
Farm sourcing

Outsourcing Modes: Deciding: Interrelated: Managing the Relationship: Outsourcing and Economic Development: Managing Distance and Time: Managing Across Cultures: Managing Knowledge Transfer: The Politics of Outsourcing: Outsourcing and Offshoring Trends.

Exercise: Distributed Agile Planning Game

Agile release iterations deliver multiple features and improvements in response to customer requests and/or project requirements (Kroll, 2007). One of the key elements of the scrum iteration is the planning activities that take place at its commencement. The goal is the organisation establishes a clear view of feature specification and value, understanding of architectural implications, and possible design solutions, and estimates of effort to facilitate the planning process between those representing the customer (or the business) and those responsible for development (Beck, 2000). The following figure suggests both how this can be part of both an up-front and an on-going process (fig. 1).

Goal
To demonstrate and experience the process of planning in a distributed team environment.

Overview

For the purpose of this exercise the following roles and activities are defined...

Roles/Identities:

• Product Owner
• Architect
• Lead Developer
• Scrum Master
• and additional developers if needed (Joe, Mary, Wu)

Activities for the PLANNING GAME

• Feature Discussion (5 minutes)
• Architecture discussion (~5 minutes)
• Design-delivery discussion (~5 minutes)
• Decide backlog including iteration deliverables, project size etc. (~10 minutes)

Materials

• Role cards
• Feature:Architecture:Deliverable diagram card
• Rules card
• A1 work sheets
• Marker pens and post-its

Part 1. Instructions  ~50'
This exercise is quite involved and difficult to understand first time, give sufficient time for the groups to produce a planning chart.

1. Divide the class into an even number of groups.
2. Handout materials and cards to each group (this can be done in advance of the class)
3. Groups assign roles.
4. Commence and conclude the first run of the group-centred PLANNING GAME. Allocate approximately 25' for this stage.
5. Each group produces a product backlog list with tentative delivery dates (Gantt style project schedule) using the A1 worksheet, post-its etc.
6. Review results with the whole class.

Discussion ~10'

What helped establish shared understanding?

How might you share knowledge in a commercial setting?

What tools and technologies facilitate?

Part 2. Instructions  ~50'

1. Divide equal numbers of either 'Clients' or 'Suppliers'
2. Now assign pairs of groups - Blue with Yellow - to conduct the second run of the game in a distributed-teams mode. 
3. Pairs of groups spend 5 minutes to introduce each other and roles.
4. Groups return to their work areas (opposite sides of the room or in different rooms).
5. Paired groups to discuss and agree a new product backlog and tentative delivery date for the first and/or subsequent iterations. Allocate approximately 15' for this stage. Paired groups may meet in person, via phone/skype, chat/text.
6. Each groups three points that worked well, three points that could be improved.
7. Paired groups report progress to the whole class.

Discussion ~10'
Do you think of the planning exercise as a problem with a fixed solution?
Do you think of the exercise as a process (on-going or one that could continue later)?
Once the groups were split into clients and suppliers did geographic separation improve or disimprove the planning process?
What kinds of things act as impediments to managing distributed teams?

References
Beck, K. (2000) Extreme Programming Explained : embrace change, Reading, MA, Addison-Wesley.
Kroll, P. (2007) OpenUP In a Nutshell. IBM Rational.
Schwaber, K. (2004) Agile Project Management with Scrum, Redmond, Washington, Microsoft Press.