Last blog

Last blog….

I am not sure if this will ever be read by anyone but there is a bit of catharsis action going on.  I think that I have put in more hours and worked harder in this class then any of the other 15 classes I have taken at WNEU in the last year.  And for all that work I will probably get my first non “A”.  

This week I struggled with the advice memo.  I have felt each week that I have no idea if I am heading down the right path as I set out to do these assignments.  In most of my professional experiences, I have had an example to read to at least see what the finished product looks like and have a feel for expected level of detail in the content.  In this class not a single example was give which made it very difficult and frankly unrealistic from a real world prospective.   

I fully believe that every organization should be customer focused.  I cannot think of one that would not have a customer.  I have been fortunate enough to have served in two during my adult life that understood this.  This also made it difficult to imagine the planning being done and described in the class as limited to the marketing department.   

I did enjoy the simulation.  I had more fun with it during the individual play and think the retry and restart options are more useful toward learning than being locked into one time like in the team play time.

I am simple glad that I have a weekend off, oh wait, I have to read for my new classes starting next week.  Bummer!

Revision of plan

This week we focused on the review of our marketing plan with the goal of revising it for the next three periods.  We conducted a new SWOT analysis.  Many of the key issues remained the same, our original plan did not accomplish what was required to eliminated these issues.  We also looked at our forecast in depth.  One of the biggest problems with the plan was that the forecast was based on a large number of assumptions.  These included market growth and inflation.  Our assumptions did not prove to be correct of either of these points.  Because to had targeted gaining market share and assumed that the market was going to grow throughout, our projected unit sales were significantly higher than actual sales.  We also assumed that inflation would continue at the same relative rate.  This also was not the case.  This lead to a miss on our pricing strategy.  Overall, we were on target for the first couple of periods while the market was growing and matched our plan.  We stumbled when the market turned and we did not adjust our plan in period 5 to account for these changes.  This lead to our version of Allstar giving up all the advances that we made in the first several period.  I believe that our team felt that we needed to stick to the plan vice adjusting midstream.  I believe that I did better mid stream because I had a general plan the third time I ran the simulation but did not feel constrained by the fact that I was going to be graded on how well I executed the plan.  This allowed me to change strategies as I went without worry.  The revision was not as difficult as generating the plan from scratch, but still required a lot of work.