It was a fantastic experience with the journey of GNAM SNOC course - “New Product Development (Fall 2020)” from Technion Israel Institute of Technology. As a supply chain planning professional, I have been involving in many new product development/launching projects within the organization, hence I was thrilled to learn that Technion is offering NPD course, aiming at teaching the tools and techniques developed to support the NPD process and gainning insight from real NPD success and failure case studies, which provides the linkage to my work. And it turned out that total seven sessions, two months of the course deserve your time and attention to be put into with.

In terms of the course itself, the most impressive part is that it provides good opportunities to students to dialogue with the startup founder(s), learn the real case of their startup business, and analyze its business mode from project management perspective. Meanwhile, the founder(s) was very accessible and eager to talk about his/her project and to learn from us as well. This is of help for us to form a structural thinking of current business management world, especially for those MBA students who are about to have or being in progress of having their own runway company and business.

Another highlight is that the course provides a project management software tool - Project Team Builder (PTB) simulator (need to pay $40 to purchase in advance), to enable you to implement the tools, techniques and insights in a simulated environment, to help make right decisions by balancing the cost, quality and time triangle that affects the scope of a project. It was a bit bitter, to be honest, to get hold of this part as you have to invest lots of time to learn how to implement, develop scenarios and micro-manage the balance, especially in the midst of your bush schedule, plus things were not as easy as just putting tasks on a Gantt. However, by going through all of this it really enbles me better understand the constraints over an NPD process and gain a more comprehensive view of how to schedule an NPD project efficiently.

As it’s an online course, it’s interesting that you will meet the classmates from countries all over the world, learn how to cooperate as a team with them and experience interesting stories, especially during this global pendemic period.

I was assigned to a group with another two teammates - Daniel from Mexico and Umang from India to work together to complete team assignments. First it was really a challenge for us to manage the timing of team discussion between America and Asia timezone as this would apply timeslots for someone in early morning or late evening, and sometimes someone doesn’t want to make the effort at their 6 am, or 11 pm so he didn’t attend the discussion. And even in one or two cases we had to intercalate some work meetings to make it happen.  As for the communication tools, what worked for us was the use of Facebook Messenger (as instant chatgroup), Email and Zoom.

During the course it was so unfortunate that Daniel from Mexico was infected with COVID-19 and got fever, but what impressed me most was that he sticked to joining the class and contributing to the orgnization of the team meeting and joining the discussion of the team work (Fortunately he was able to get recovered at last). We also experienced conflicts and quarrels during team cooperation in terms of workload allocation, what’s the right decision and conclusion of the project report. But at last as a team we were able to overcome the cultural difference we brougt from, achieve the alignment and complete each team assignment, especially the final team project report with good quality in front of a very tight deadline ahead.

Finally, it is out of my expectation that I got the “Excellent” as final grade of this course and rank 2 (8 students in total were rated Excellent) of total 30 students at last, which is really exciting. What I want to share as last point is that just fully enjoy the SNOC course,  make every endevor on what you have invested, and you will get more than expected.

About SNOCs: SNOCs are GNAM Online Courses for-credit courses offered remotely and online by a member school and open to students from the whole network, targeted only to high-performing MBA students enrolled in a business school member of GNAM.

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