The snow, project management, Chinese New Year celebrations and other updates

Greetings from Cranfield 🙂

I am sure you’ve read Nok’s post from two weeks ago – we’ve had snow here at Cranfield! It’s prettier than you’d ever imagine. I had to borrow a few photos from Punyawee Pom again 🙂 I picked my favourite two, here you go…

Okay… I admit that I was supposed to update this blog last week. I apologise for the delay, but I promise it’s all for good reasons. Now, let me talk about what happened to all LSCMers last week!

Critical path analysis, Gantt charts, risk analysis… I think you have pretty much figured out what we did from all these listed terms – Project Management! We had a whole week of it. A typical day was pretty much from 8:30am to 11:00pm for most project teams. It was the worst on Wednesday and Thursday evening when each team had to submit a project plan and prepare for a review presentation for early morning submissions.

So the week consisted of two and a half days of lectures learning all the skills and techniques one needs to become a good project manager. We then had two briefings on the simulation case material (a project on the construction of a roof for an aquatics centre of similar size to the London Aquatic Centre for the 2012 London Olympics). Next there was a half a day for the preparation of the project plan and a full day of the project simulation. Finally a day for presentations and learning review.

In all, it was a tough week, but we all learnt a lot from going through this intensive process. I can assure you that project management is much more exciting than you might have interpreted from its name. I found the team building, and working and learning from other team members extremely beneficial.

To give you a taste of our Project Management week, here are some photos:

We were preparing for the project plan and simulation day into the midnight

Despite the fact that I was super tired and sleepy on Friday, I couldn’t miss the Chinese New Year celebration in the Cranfield Student Association’s in the evening! The gala was well organised and a lot of Chinese students had devoted their free time to the preparation of the singing, dancing, musical instrument performances and a talk show. The little room was filled with students, professors, families and friends – it really felt like one big family! Although we couldn’t be with our family and friends back home (and it might also be the first Chinese New Year away from home for some) gathering together did make us all feel festive!

Well, my other reasons for the delay were the deadline on Wednesday for an elective module that I chose for this term – performance measurement in the supply chain (PFM), and another elective that just finished today – designing and managing resilient supply chains (RSC). Both were very interesting topics and taught by prestigious professors and lecturers. For PFM, we had Dr Andrey Pavlov who specialises in strategic performance management and organisational theory. For RSC, over a day and a half, we had Dr Uta Jüttner (part-time Senior Lecturer in the Demand Chain Management Group) and Otto Kocsis (Principal Engineer Business Resilience in Zurich Insurance) from Switzerland, Professor Richard Wilding OBE and Emeritus Professor Martin Christopher here in Cranfield.

Term two is slightly more flexible in terms of timetable arrangement in the sense that there are blocks of time available during lectures for the electives which you didn’t pick. However, eight assignment deadlines within just over 3 months time is still quite challenging.

We are taking these challenges step by step! Plus it’s not too long until the Easter break. And, of course, we also have the International Study Tour in April to look forward to. See you soon!