Graduate Business Administration

This course utilizes quantitative analysis as well as qualitative skills to analyze and interpret a company’s financial statements and position from a manager’s perspective, with an emphasis on making financial decisions. Cases will be used to illustrate analysis of external and internal financial reporting with a focus on forecasting and valuation. Various types of organizations will be considered.

Business intelligence is the implementation of information technology strategies for data analysis in order to provide historical, current and predictive views of business operations. In this course, students learn and apply software that facilitates online analytical processing, analytics, data/process/text mining, complex event processing, business performance management, benchmarking and predictive/prescriptive analytics. This hands-on course emphasizes the application of business intelligence to improve business decision making and strategies interventions.

In this course, students will learn to plan and run projects with special consideration of risk management. Students will develop strategies for addressing resource constraints in project planning, scheduling and management. They will learn how to align resources with demand and how to address scheduling conflicts in order to deliver the project on time and under budget. Students will apply crashing techniques (compression strategies) to projects running behind schedule and they will address project creep resulting from new customer requirements. We will use MS Project Management in this course to manage resources and the project schedule. We will also focus on the human element and look at some basic effective team management concepts. Finally, we will explore elements of risk and learn how to control or mitigate those risks during the project lifecycle. Specifically, we will learn to identify potential risks, quantify risk impact and likelihood, implement countermeasures where appropriate and establish systems to monitor and control the risks.

This course is designed as the capstone experience of the 5-Year MBA. The field experience will enhance each student’s skills in participating as a team member towards real-world project goals. Working with a small group of students as a consulting team, the students will conduct an experiential learning opportunity in partnership with a local business, with the business partnerships created in conjunction with the MBA concentration areas (healthcare administration or project management). The field experience opportunity will allow for the students to employ practical application of the concepts learned during the MBA program while working directly with industry professionals on a specific business project. A formal presentation and report to the business client will conclude the project.

The seminar class will provide the students working on the different consulting field experience projects the opportunity to meet together as a larger group and with faculty to better ensure that the goals, objectives and eventual results of each of the projects are successful. The seminar will cover topic areas including effective written and oral business communication skills, to better prepare the students in developing their final project presentations and reports for the business clients.

This course explores how leaders use power and influence to build organizational effectiveness and team and personal performance.  We will discuss sources of power, the ethics involved in the use - and sometimes - abuse of power, and your personal relationship with power and influence in multiple settings.  The use of influence in motivating employees, negotiating, collaborating and maintaining a competitive advantage domestically and globally are additional considerations.