Data Mining&Business Planning of Engineering/Research Projects

1. Data Mining&Business Planning of Engineering/Research Projects Practice 1 Dr. Gábor Pauler, Associate Professor Faculty of Sciences, University of Pécs Tel:30/9015-488 E-mail:pauler@t-online.hu

2. Content of the Practice • Form project teams • Brainstorming to create product ideas • STEP 1: Select moderator, sitting • STEP 2: Collect ideas with roll call, rules • STEP 3: Evaluation of ideas • STEP 4: Voting • STEP 5: Action plan • Home Assignment 1: STEP+SWOT analysis • References

3. Form project teams, Brainstorming to create product ideas 1 • Students should form 4-5 member project teams: • Try to form inter-disciplinary (Interdiszciplináris) teams: Eg. Even if the your project will be about some new bioinfo software, it is worth to include not just biologists or IT guys, but economists or lawyers also (if they are available). You never know in advance whose knowledge will be essental for survival • Select a group leader, who is motivated, communicative and resposible • Don’t stress about if you can not find the right group or group leader now. Groups will only be finalized at the beginning of Practice 3. • All teams should organize Brainstorming (Ötletroham) session to generate product/service ideas for their course project: • It is a fast group Decision making (Döntéshozatali) tool lead by preselec-ted Moderator (Moderátor) (the group leader) in 15-20 minutes time frame. • STEP 1: Participants are sit around a table in EQUAL POSITION: order of sitting can express ranks of people in itself and can distort deci-sion making (eg. someone sitting in at the center in a raised, luxury chair becomes more important than others sitting on small chairs at the side)

4. Brainstorming to create product/service ideas 2 • STEP 2: the moderator adresses the problem and ask participants to tell ideas about it in ½-1 minute on a roll-call basis (Körben egymás után). • At the beginning, the roll call by moderator is very frustrating, resembling to a „silly kindergarten game” ashaming adults. Most people will not have any idea to tell, but then the group waits 30 seconds silently for him to tell something. Silence has quite an effective motivation tool to make somebody to tell something, even the slightest idea. It motivates other people in row to find out some idea quickly to avoid discomforting silence • On the other hand, whatever high rank somebody has, whatever good presentator he is, being whatever agressive debatter, or having whatever good idea, CAN NOT TALK LONGER than 1 minute, the moderator should be very strict about it. This is totally against the traditional Hungarian culture, where on a meeting (after the usual 20 minutes late) the boss starts to speak about his hunting stories, blondie woman jokes, politics, weather, soccer and 2 hours of time of 8-10 highly paid people goes for nothing, while very bad decisions are made quickly in last 3 minutes.

5. Brainstorming to create product/service ideas 3 • NO ONE CAN CRITICISE each others ideas in this stage, the only silly idea is the not told idea. There are people who are more aggressive than others and instinctly try to force other people accept their views, even going into lenghty personal flaming (in Hungarian culture: calling up each others communist b..tch mother) without any result. The moderator should definitely block this, because it is not sure that the most aggressive people have the best ideas. Sometimes the real solution is at „shy rabbits” hand, who would not tell a word in the whole meeting without the forcing of roll-call. Thats why we have to make the „silly kindergarten-game”. • During roll call, the moderator records the ideas and their owners on a blackboard (or, projected electronic drawboard, for easier editing) and tries to group very similar ideas together with the idea owners consent • Here we show how the moderator can put ideas in preformatted textboxes copy-pasted on a PowerPoint slide in the lack of specialized drawing board software: Owner: Peter Votes: - Idea: Central reagent inventory for all labs : : Owner: Laci Votes: - Idea: Unused equipment bidding on internet across all labs : : Owner: Gyuri + Lajos Votes: - Idea: 1. Common inventory software for all labs 2. With synchronized item numbers : : Owner: Votes: Idea: : : Ctrl C Ctrl V

6. Content of the Practice • Form project teams • Brainstorming to create product ideas • STEP 1: Select moderator, sitting • STEP 2: Collect ideas with roll call, rules • STEP 3: Evaluation of ideas • STEP 4: Voting • STEP 5: Action plan • Home Assignment 1: STEP+SWOT analysis • References

7. Brainstorming to create product/service ideas 4 • After 1 or 2 rounds of roll call, an ASSOCIATIVE CHAIN REACTION starts, and people will tell more and more connecting ideas. In this phase the roll call can be broken, but time limit still holds. • STEP 3: Collected ideas are evaluated by  advantages and  disadvanta-ges (especially reflecting their estimated cost). This is because concurrent idea owners are more willing to notice disadvantages of each others ideas (This will be the input of SWOT analysis later!!!!). However to prevent endless debates, the moderator limits this phase to 5-8 minutes. • STEP 4: Members of the group are voting on ideas. Everyone allocates points 5 (for best idea in his view), poins 4, poins 3, ponts 2, and point 1 (for least good, but still considerable idea). If bosses require this, their higher power can be represented in that they can allocate more points (10, 8, 6, 4, 2) to given ideas. The moderator records votes to ideas, summarizes them and annonuces list of ideas ordered by decreasing points. • STEP 5: In post processing, decision makers can set up an action plan from this list assigning responsible persons, resourcesanddeadlines for certain elements of the list. As plan was set up by some kind of group consense, its more likely to be executed without sabotaging it in fraction wars. Owner: Gyuri + Lajos Votes: Idea: 1. Common inventory software for all labs 2. With synchronized item numbers :Can virtualize distributed inventory :Institutes will resist Medium cost 0.5-1MFt Owner: Peter Votes: Idea: Central reagent inventory for all labs :Reduce inventory cost :Very large initial investment >30MFt Owner: Laci Votes: Idea: Unused equipment bidding on internet across all labs :Cheap <500EFt :Not compulsory 16 9 12

8. Home Assignment 1: STEP+SWOT analysis • After deciding about product/service idea in brainstorming session, each project team should write the STEP analysis of their solution in 1 page (1pts) • And SWOT analysis, detailing Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threatens of the idea in 2 pages (2pts) • Solution hint 1: Strenghts and Opportunities should be worked out by owner(s) of the winning idea in brainstorming session, Weaknesses and Threatens should be worked out by owner of the strongest, but unnacepted idea to create real criticism • Solution hint 2: Use Alan Chapmans SWOT Template • Sample solution: HomeAssign1Solution.doc

9. References Brainstorming sessions: • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainstorming • http://www.mindtools.com/brainstm.html • http://www.jpb.com/creative/brainstorming.php STEP analysis: • http://www.learnmarketing.net/pestanalysis.htm • http://www.managingchange.com/step/overview.htm • http://www.scribd.com/doc/7802120/STEP-Analysis-Marketing-Strategy SWOT analysis: • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWOT_analysis • http://www.quickmba.com/strategy/swot/ • http://www.businessballs.com/swotanalysisfreetemplate.htm