Wrapping up.

Hi all,

Did a lucky draw for 5 people to receive 2000/- in sodexo coupons. The following are the names:

1.Debdutt Patro from Bengaluru for Team Sultanpur

2. Manonita Das from Vizag

3. Rahul Modi from Chennai for DumDum group

4. Mrs Usha Chandrashekaran from Chennai for Team Naihati

5. Varun Verma from Punjab for Team Jhunjuni

The grades will soon be out. Re phase III grading, I received this from K:

Dear Prof. Sudhir,


Could you please let us know if we could have a feedback session on our project report for MKTR?

Since this subject is extremely important going forward for our careers, it is important for us to understand how to improve upon our work.
Thanks and regards,
K

My response:

Sure K,
BTW, which group was yours and how much did you score out of 20?


P.S.
I deliberately didn't look at student names in the first slide so as to avoid any possibility of bias.

Overall, I think the quality of project submissions was ceretainly higher this year than in the past 2. The variance is lower and the mean higher. I believe it has something to do with the example projects helping people avoid re-inventing the wheel and go with what works.

I was also pleasently surprised to see the surfeit of secondary data used in various creative ways to support the storyline. In the car project, I had provided the class with a secondary dataset on car sales by brand. Here, people went out ontheir own and got the data. Nice.

Some raised the objection that the same IP address was used multiple times. I;'d raised this with IT who said that in LAN connections, the webserver's IP may get used as common proxy. So its not necessary that the same person is re-taking the surveys.

Some teams wrote in 'learnings' that questionnaire wasn't clear on project goals and could have been designed better. Sure. A concomitant learning is that no questionnaire for a large and diffuse project will be perfect. There'll always be things that could have been done better. Often, clients themselves wouldn;t have very clear-cut business problems to give the MKTR teams. All this is part of life, of how things work in the real world. You go with the data you have and see how best what you want can be squeezed out of it.

Thanks to a few teams for the some of the creative sher-shayaris I saw in some PPTs. Added zest and liveliness to the whole thing.

That's it folks. Shall putup grade distribution in my next and last post for this year.

Sudhir