In this discussion, introduce yourself to the class and share your background of personal and professional experience.

Using professional, personal, or academic experience, describe the operations management (OM) framework or environment in which you work or are most familiar with. Briefly discuss those key factors that drove change in the OM environment in which you work. Note the general nature of these factors, such as technology, economic, political, or other.

In response to your classmates’ posts, discuss key similarities and differences influencing the changes in your chosen environment. Are the changes related to technology, competitive forces, development or depletion of nature resources, or political or economic forces?

It is essential to understand the development of one's own industry in context of the factors that drove change in the past. These may also be some of the same factors that will continue to drive change in the future.

Based on the business plan you created in MBA 560: Marketing and Strategy, describe the impact of those factors of change identified in your discussion posting this week. Identify key obstacles/opportunities that necessitated the changes and the nature of changes made in the related industry. The assessment should include a section on both the enabling factors and the inhibiting factors that drove the change. The force field analysis technique can be used to help illustrate this concept. The related article and video in the module resources can help you with this concept.

This assignment will help you complete Milestone One, which is due in Module Three.

For additional details, please refer to the Module One Short Paper Guidelines and Rubric document. See attachmentLink for the force field analysishttps://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTED_06.htm

To demonstrate what you are thinking and how you are processing in response to this week's concepts, you will select one case study from the unit readings and create a 15 – 20 slide PowerPoint presentation.

Assignment:

• Create your PowerPoint presentation from the viewpoint of the executive, professional, or manager with decision-making responsibility for solving the problem posed in the case study of your choice.
• Recall the “Risk, Reward, Responsibility: Ethics in Business” video and create the PowerPoint as though you were making the presentation to the Board of Directors of the company involved, which has the ultimate authority to adopt the solution you propose.
• State in the presentation your personal opinion concerning the optimum (best) outcome that can be achieved. Support your opinion with the ethical and moral principles you have studied.

Shockley-Zalabak (2012) describes strategic organizational communication as "communication processes in which organizational messages are deliberately generated and guided by organizational objectives" (p. 353). Keeping this in mind, explore Southwest Airline's Web site in depth:
Identify the overall message Southwest Airlines is attempting to convey to stakeholders.
Which stakeholders are targeted on this Web site?
Identify uses of marketing verses public relation functions with these stakeholders.
Do you feel that Southwest Airlines has successfully integrated their marketing communications? Explain why or why not.

How well do you respond to change? Review the Who Moved My Cheese? change concepts as quoted from the 8th edition of the Shockley-Zalabak text. If possible, obtain and review a copy of the book Who Moved My Cheese? by Johnson and Blanchard (1998).

1. Having cheese makes you happy.
2. The more important your cheese is to you, the more you want to hold onto it.
3. If you do not change, you can become extinct.
4. What would you do if you were not afraid?
5. Smell the cheese often so you know when it is getting old.
6. Movement in a new direction helps you find new cheese.
7. When you move beyond your fear, you feel free.
8. Imagining yourself enjoying new cheese even before you find it, leads you to it.
9. The quicker you let go of old cheese, the sooner you will find new cheese.
10. It is safer to search in the maze than remain in a cheeseless situation.
11. Old beliefs do not lead you to new cheese.
12. When you see that you can find and enjoy new cheese, you change course.
13. Noticing small changes early helps you adapt to the bigger changes that are to come.
14. Move with the cheese and enjoy it! (Johnson & Blanchard, 1998)

Optionally conduct Internet research about how Johnson's change concepts have grown into a multimillion dollar corporate enterprise. Then based on the textbook and optional additional research:

• Share any experiences or insights you may have related to this popular organizational change.
• Share personal ideas and insights related to the above change concepts.
• Is there a difference in your response when change is unexpected and when you plan for the change? What makes the difference?

Reference

Johnson, S., & Blanchard, K. (1998). Who moved my cheese? New York, NY: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 

1. If government employees were to be given a limited right to strike, which occupations should be prohibited from striking, and under what conditions should the prohibition be enforced?

Assignment    Employment Paper
      Imagine you are an administrator for the government employment office of the State of Abundance, and you just attended a seminar on business anti-discrimination issues. Detail: Write a report of approximately 1,250–1,500 words to the Governor discussing the major issues to be considered in avoiding discrimination in state employment. Address the following in your paper
In what situations may the State require previous training or a degree as a condition for employment?
In what situations may the State require tests as a condition for employment or promotion
In what situations may the State set physical requirements or gender requirements as a condition of employment?
How does disparate-impact discrimination occur and how can the State protect itself against creating such discrimination in its employment practices as well as successfully defend itself in a disparate-impact case?  Please use the IRAC methodology to show the reasoning behind your answers to the questions
Provide a minimum of 5 references. Format – APA Format

Assignment:    State Taskforce on Risk Avoidance
Detail:     Read the following:Imagine you are the administrative director of a new task force set up by the State of Abundance to re-program and re-task all government departments to avoid or at least minimize, some of the legal pitfalls the State may encounter in today’s litigious world.You must present to the Governor recommendations (strategies) and actions (tactics) that the State can take to achieve these goals (The Action Plan).  A plan of action is not the same as being able to summarize a topic's concepts or paraphrase its rules.  Thus, your paper should not be a summary of the applicable laws, but rather the application of your knowledge of the legal rules you have studied in this course to create an Action Plan that the State can implement in order to minimize a particular legal risk.Example 1.  You know that a mortgage (or, in most states, a deed of trust) is a document giving the lender the legal right to take a borrower's house away if the borrower fails to make payments on the loan used to by the house.  (The same would be true of a loan to by a car.) Such transactions are called secured transactions; performance is secured (guaranteed) by something other than a promise.  Is there any reason why secured transactions cannot be used to guaranty performance obligations of ordinary business transactions?  Thus, a valuable risk-avoidance strategy would be, whenever possible, to take a security interest in some business assets of a party to a contract as a guaranty for performance obligations under that contract (such as personal guarantees or deeds of trust on the business owner's house). In the event of a default in the performance, your company will have some protection or at least a fairly immediate remedy.  This is an example that illustrates risk-minimization strategies (taking security interests) and tactics (getting a guaranty or deed to trust) in contrast to simply knowing the rules of contract law.  I do not expect you to use this example when discussing minimization of contract risk; there are many other, more import methods.Example 2.  When dealing with the intellectual property assets associated with the State's services, what the State is looking for is a discussion of actions that it can take to protect its IP assets, intellectual property rules such as those for copyright registration or for patent applications.The Action Plan. While the suggestions in your Action Plan will require an understanding of the legal concepts that define the risk and may require a brief definition of the rules associated with a particular area of legal risk, it is not to be a summary of the law.  The Action Plan must focus on and be devoted primarily to presenting practical actionable solutions.  However, there are no blanket solutions such as having the State's lawyers review all company actions, company contracts, or using ADR in all disputes (which still costs time and money). Solutions are proactive tactical actions that the State can take in advance to avoid or minimize the legal risk in the first place.Write a paper of approximately 3,000 words that addresses the following issues:
Describe the actions that the State should take to minimize the legal risks related to the topics you have studied in this course
Identify the problems that can be affected by the State’s actions and the steps required to reach the desired outcomes.
Provide IRAC-type analyses showing the reasoning behind each of your recommendations
Provide a minimum of 4 references.Format – APA Format 

For this Assignment, imagine you are the head of research at a large urban hospital associated with a major university. The hospital has the chance to hire a doctor who is doing ground-breaking but controversial research on the cloning of humans. Specifically, he is known for creating “spare parts” children. Here is how it works: In a few cases where parents have had one child with a serious disease, they have used in vitro fertilization to create embryos so that they can have a second child that can act as a future, tailor-made blood or bone marrow donor. When the “spare parts” child is born, he or she will be healthy and can help his or her older brother or sister stay well on an “as-needed” basis by donating the needed blood or marrow. The potential exists to use the child to donate other organs that require a genetic match, such as kidneys.The hospital’s Board of Trustees, comprised of doctors, lawyers, academics, and clergy is divided on whether the hospital should hire the doctor. Assignment:Write a 3–4 page position paper in which you argue whether or not to hire the doctor.As you formulate you position, you should:
Review the “Three Farewells: Medicine & the End of Life” video located at http://www.learner.org/resources/series207.html.
Write your position paper as though you were making the presentation to the panel of doctors, lawyers, academics, and clergy in the video, which has the ultimate authority to accept or reject the course of action you recommend. The question is whether or not the doctor should be hired to serve on the hospital staff full-time to provide the service of creating "spare parts" children in the future as needed. 
Support your opinion with the ethical and moral principles you have studied

In Module Three, students will apply the information learned in the previous modules and submit the Operations Management portion of their final project. This module covers the process of location selection and the identification of IT systems to support production operations, specifically enterprise resource planning (ERP) and materials requirements planning (MRP).The business location selection process is technical and involves the use of quantitative tools. A business may consider several locations and then make the most lucrative decision based on the analysis. For example, a manufacturer that ships to several specific warehouse locations must consider the set distance and the tonnage of product shipped to each location to logically compare the shipping costs to and from various locations. In retail, a retailer must consider the location in terms of cost and proximity to customers. This is also common for service businesses. Hair salons must consider the customer traffic potential at various locations and the cost of the site to make the best choice among multiple options.The adaption of a production management information system (MIS) is one of the most important decisions a business manager makes. Over the last several decades, the concept of the ERP system has been embedded in many businesses. An ERP MIS seeks to integrate various areas of the company, such as planning, purchasing, inventory, production, sales, marketing, finance, and human resources. ERP has enormous potential for a firm but because of the sheer magnitude of the IS data requirements, ERP proves to be an enormous undertaking. However, for the purposes of this course, students will use ERP or MRP as the chosen method to manage the IS needs for their company.In Module Four, product/service design, just-in-time (JIT), and lean operations will be covered. This design will provide the basis of the new business opportunity that the student will be deploying in a later module. The creation of a project management plan for this business opportunity will be the topic of the final project due in Module Nine.  Submit the Operations Management section (Section I) of your project management plan.

Assess the history and trends of operations management, focusing on the business or company from your business plan in the Marketing and Strategy course. Provide rationale for the selection of your business development opportunity. Detail initial estimates of demand based on your forecasts and justify your selection of forecasting methods. Determine site location(s) and provide specific quantitative rationale for your selection.

For additional details, please refer to the Final Project Guidelines and Rubric document and the Milestone One Guidelines and Rubric document.