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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.

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 

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