Online Master of Science in Management

This course presents a strategic and analytical approach to complex behavioral problems involving interactions among individuals, teams, and organizational factors. The course explores topics such as leadership, team dynamics, motivation, decision-making, power/persuasion, and conflict as they apply to the management of individuals and teams in organizations. The class utilizes case studies, experiential exercises, personal reflection, and an organizational consulting project to practice and refine students’ management skills as well as to gain insight into their own strengths and weaknesses as a manager.

Managers need to be able to scan and understand the external environment in order to engage in the important planning and decision making tasks they face. In this course, students will learn tools and techniques used by managers for understanding & analyzing the business environment, resources for environmental scanning and competitive analysis; how to identify and evaluate trends for the purposes of problem diagnosis & opportunity recognition; approaches to strategic prioritization; and sources of competitive advantage.

This course examines the principles of judgment and choice in the face of uncertainty. Students will be introduced to normative (i.e., how best to decide) and behavioral decision making (i.e., how do we decide). The latter approach recognizes that people use various tricks (i.e., heuristics) that simplify cognitive processing. While these serve well in some instances, they may also become traps that lead to poor results in others. Extensive study of bias will help students recognize these tendencies and become better decision makers following a third approach known as prescriptive decision making (i.e., how should we decide).

This course focuses on how large organizations manage innovation, technology commercialization and entrepreneurship. Key activities and processes are explored in the class, including innovation management, research and development, technology commercialization, corporate entrepreneurship, incubation, corporate venturing and corporate venture capital. The class will also engage students in practical projects associated with innovation and entrepreneurship within companies.

In this class students will learn how to use common tools and techniques to generate, validate and assess new venture ideas. The class will be principally practical focusing on ideation efforts and will engage students in a process of screening, validating and building new business concepts. Students in this class will learn how to use the business model canvas and other lean launch techniques to validate their business models. Critical skills, such as, pitching and selling concepts will also be acquired.

Students will focus on detailed planning and validation of new ventures. This class will use a business planning format to engage student teams in industrial analysis, market research, sales and marketing planning, operations and financial planning for a new venture concept. Students will learn key aspects of venture planning and will acquire skills in business planning, market research and investment due diligence presentations and processes.

This course examines the ramifications of ethical and legal issues between employers and their employees, unions, independent contractors and customers. The focus is on the role of the manager in ensuring both ethical practice and legal compliance in all areas of managing the human resources in an organization.

This course is a deep dive into the strategic management aspects of talent acquisition, development and succession planning for organizational performance, sustainability and longevity. The course will examine talent management from the enterprise or macro firm perspective and then share specific processes and tools for delivering results. Through agile teaming, complex business cases and in-class conversations with talent management scholars and executives, students will investigate the essential contribution of talent for executing business strategy while ensuring individual, team and cultural alignment aspects. The course will utilize historical and modern perspectives of talent management, as well as numerous theories of human resource management and organizational behavior. For learning discovery, the course instructional design features a strong focus on team-based projects, consultative case analysis, simulations and in-class discussions to provide practical examples of effective and ineffective strategic talent management. Course content will be explored from both a personal perspective and a professional business manager, or human resource professional perspective.

In today's globally competitive environment, organizations are more focused than ever on delivering measurable results - at an enterprise, business unit, team, and individual level. Performance, compensation and benefit systems are critical to attracting, motivating, and rewarding highly talented employees. Developing a comprehensive, effective performance management and reward system is a critical Human Resource imperative.

Often we are involved with developing a new system, a new product, planning an event, or participating in an undertaking where we cannot simply repeat things we have done in our past experience. These are "one-offs" or Projects. Projects are major undertakings that have a defined lifetime (i.e. limited duration) and a specific outcome. As such, they require a unique approach to management and administration. It is important to understand and appreciate the techniques and concepts used for successful project management. This course covers some of the basic issues related to, and tools used for, managing projects, and provides an opportunity for students to learn the application of the tools and concepts of project management.

Organizations are under increasing pressure to be better, faster, and cheaper. This pressure has driven many organizations to adopt process improvement methodologies, like Lean Six Sigma, to increase quality and decrease costs. This course is designed to equip students with the foundation of theoretical knowledge and skills necessary to manage Lean Six Sigma programs. The course integrates basic learning (through readings and lectures) with real-world examples. After completing this course, students should understand how to effectively manage and navigate a process improvement program.

Properly addressing risks and facing possible disruptions are of primary importance to supply chain management. With the wake of high consequence disruptive events, risk identification and disruption response activities have become ever more critical. The objective of the course is to provide an overview of key supply chain risk areas, particularly with the proliferation of outsourcing, use of information technology and global logistics. Equally important is how companies are managing the preparation, mitigation and response strategies to major disruptive events. Topics covered include the science of catastrophes, vulnerability and threat assessments, resources and capabilities identification/integration, basic crisis management, contingency planning, disaster recovery, and business continuity in supply chain settings.

Some refer to analytics as the new science of winning. It refers to a commitment by top management to the extensive use of data, statistical and quantitative analysis, explanatory and predictive models and fact-based management to drive decisions and actions. This course provides an introduction to analytics and covers spreadsheet modeling for decision-making. It employs techniques from the classical disciplines of statistics and operations research, as well as more recently developed methodologies: data mining, executive information systems, digital dashboards, and online analytical processing. You will be expected to master, at an introductory level, techniques that are at the heart of the competitive posture of many successful organizations.

Predictive analytics encompasses a variety of statistical and machine learning techniques and applications within a business environment. The primary goal of predictive analytics is to discover and apply relationships found within historic datasets to make predictions about the future or otherwise unknown events. In this hands-on course, students will be introduced to concepts related to constructing, testing, and applying quantitative models in various business settings. From this perspective, students will utilize major software tools to conduct an analysis of continuous, classification, and clustering models. Upon completion of this course, students will gain insight into how models are constructed and how predictive models can improve business.

This course provides a broad overview of business intelligence and data management including database fundamentals, business intelligence approaches, data management/data governance strategies, data mining, and other business/data analytics techniques. Our primary emphasis will be on the managerial perspective, focusing on how you can design, implement, and leverage business intelligence systems and strategies in a management role.