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MS Software Management Blog

Wondering if a Carnegie Mellon degree is right for you? Read along as our students chronicle their journey through the MS in Software Management program.

Amin is a second year grad student in the MS Software Management program, a former Software Design Engineer from Microsoft and a current Software Engineer at Adify, a Silicon Valley startup. He is passionate about entrepreneurship, software and traveling. He would love to start a software company someday.
Vineet is a second year part-time software management student, currently working @NetApp also nominated as the best place to work in North America recently. His area of expertise is Oracle ERP solutions. Other professional areas of interest are SaaS markets both technologically and business wise. @CMU he wants to grow his knowledge to manage software products and businesses. He is interested in work on start up ideas. On the personal side he loves to spend time with his family and travel.
Rene is a recent alum, a manager of operations and program manager in Cisco's software development organization, the mother of two daughters and a performing arts fan.

Thursday, October 23, 2008

Wrapping up Elements of Software Management


In this entry I will discuss the last two weeks of the 7-week Elements of Software Management class. Our final assignment called on us to make a presentation about the software business prognosis of our assigned companies. This would draw on different skill sets. We needed to work with our teams to agree on a common approach to assessing the prognosis for each of our companies. We then needed to synthesize the key points from all of our earlier assignments, especially drawing on the market analysis, business strategy and financial analysis, and to determine where we believed our companies would be at a time in the future.

The task required that we organize our findings in a coherent presentation format suitable for communication in a short amount of time. We presented our findings to faculty and other students, fielding questions that called on more in-depth knowledge. These presentations gave us the opportunity to get feedback from faculty on our content and presentation styles as well as to observe our classmates and to learn from their characterizations of their own companies.

Reflecting on the entirety of the course, I have discovered how to work within the framework of the program, including team collaboration and learning by doing, while also considering my longer-term learning plan and how the current assignments relate to that plan. I better understand the larger software industry that is the subject of this course and of others that are coming later in the program. I have also
become an active member of the Carnegie Mellon University Silicon Valley community, and look forward to the learning opportunities to come.

I will return soon to share experiences related to the second class in the program.

posted by Rene Newton @ 11:54 AM  0 comments

Friday, October 17, 2008

Elements of Software Management


In this entry I will explain the middle weeks of the Elements of Software Management class. The major assignment in this class is to study a company and get to know it inside an out, each week focusing on different aspects of the company. The focus of Weeks Two and Three is on market analysis and business strategy assessment. We explored these subjects in the class sessions by reflecting on the readings and understanding the perspectives of the faculty facilitators and of the students in the class.

It became clear that a key principle of this class was for us to understand the industry context in which our assigned company was operating. Following that principle, we were called on to consider whether the strategy our company was following was the right strategy given the company's external opportunities and threats and internal strengths and weaknesses. Our team meetings during these weeks provided the opportunity for more exploration of the market analysis and business strategy principles as well as for sharing research and reference approaches.

Weeks Four and Five took our learning to a new level. Our task assignment called for an extensive financial analysis of the companies we had been researching. The curriculum associated with these weeks included material related to financial statement analysis,
considerations of company growth, and alternative ways to determine how well a company is performing. For many of us, completing this assignment entailed both absorbing a large set of financial analysis and management concepts as well as embarking on a more finely tuned research effort. We needed to grasp the financial health of our companies as well as to understand the customer perspective and the company's internal capabilities and ability to innovate.

Our team meetings were particularly enlightening for this assignment. We had the opportunity to learn from each other about our research and analytical approaches and to benefit from discussion of the questions that each of us brought in. Our coach provided insights regarding the importance of various financial indicators as well as specific considerations for each of our companies.

By this time, all of us were deeply immersed in the background and strategy of our research companies. This knowledge would be essential for the final assignment that I'll discuss in my next entry.

posted by Rene Newton @ 11:31 AM  0 comments

Monday, October 13, 2008

Orientation and First Week of Classes!


In this entry I will explain my experiences in the Software Management
program Orientation and the first week of class.

The Orientation brought together all of the students entering Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley this fall. Key points explained in an opening session included the concepts of a learning community, learn-by-doing methodology, student collaboration in small teams, and a project-based curriculum. We would be learning in a curriculum that does not include lectures and is instead based on participation in facilitated plenary sessions and team meetings, absorption of assigned readings and outside research, and completion of individual and team-based assignments. We were encouraged to take responsibility for our experience by creating our own learning plan.

Several team-based activities during the orientation enabled us to get to know other students and to work on our leadership, communication, and collaboration skills. We attended a presentation by the CEO of a well-known software company in which we came to appreciate the contextual leadership style of the presenter. A workshop on
presentation skills gave us feedback on how to communicate more effectively. I emerged from the orientation feeling grounded in the principles of the program and eager to connect with my new classmates and team members.

The first class for our Software Management cohort is a 7-week course called Elements of Software Management. The structure of the course includes a weekly facilitated plenary session encompassing discussion of readings and explanation of that week's assignment. In the first plenary we learned that our class was geographically distributed, with many students attending from other places in the United States and one from outside of the US. We discovered that while our motivations for attending the program had some common elements relating to understanding the business of software, additional reasons included the desire to understand different business models and approaches to
business analysis.

posted by Rene Newton @ 2:47 PM  0 comments

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