UIC IPD
My first review will be about the IPD - Interdisciplinary Product Development class (IPD Website). While I can’t go into specific details (confidentiality agreement), I will talk about the class a little bit.
The class is run by three professors, Albert Page (Business), Michael Scott (Engineering), and Stephen Melamed (Design). In a perfect world, there would be equal number of students from each of those three colleges. In reality, there are more Design and Engineer students than MBA students. The class is broken down into 5 teams, comprised of 2-3 Design students, 2-3 Engineer students, and 1-2 MBA student in each group.
IPD is actually a very interesting concept. Instead of going through all the regular channels in product development (ie. Marketing–> Design–>Engineer–>Marketing), the team works together throughout the whole process. This eliminates some of the potential problems that may arise from each department and also shortens the time that a product can reach market. If the benefits are so obvious, why isn’t everyone doing this? Well, there are many potential problems that arise within each team. Since the groups are made up of students from three different colleges, different backgrounds, different experiences, it makes it difficult to have an instant bond.
The three professors try to solve this problem through the first few weeks of the class. There are team building events, seminar speakers, and group projects in which you analyze your own group. This all helps a lot but it is up to each individual group to improve itself.
The way the class is run and taught is a little unconventional. The syllabus is a rough guide and project and assignments are constantly being dropped and added. Deadlines and pushed back and forth and it is difficult to follow along with sometimes. I believe Professor Melamed described it best by saying that, all our majors teach us to be problem solvers. We intellectually want to solve the problem but we don’t actually know what the problem is yet. It takes one whole semester to try and figure out the problem and another semester to come up with the solution. We won’t actually know what the problem is until we start analyzing and researching more. The sponsor company doesn’t know the problem, the professors don’t know and we sure as hell don’t know. This feeling we have of uncertainty is often confused with a feeling of frustration.
To sum up, IPD is a pretty interesting class. We work on a real-life problem for a fortune 500 company. As of now, we are trying to identify the problem. The class is definitely unconventional. The classroom is pretty upbeat and unique. You’ll definitely feel out of place because of the mix of students and there is a lot of work outside of class. Besides all this, I am still interested to see where this class is heading. In the real world, you’re not always given a problem and there is not always a solution. We just live and learn.
By the way, for MBA student, you do not need to take Mktg500 before taking this class. You can take it concurrent with it. This is my first semester at UIC and I’m taking both classes. If you have any questions, feel free to ask!
Posted under UIC MBA Liautaud
This post was written by Jay on October 29, 2008
