This course is designed for students, regardless of their majors, whose ambitions are to become future managers and leaders of enterprises. In this course, we introduce core common ideas for understanding and improving an enterprise, be it for-profit, non-profit, or governmental. Some of the questions to be studied and illuminated are: How to understand and discover the various operations/processes of an enterprise? How to describe and model these processes? How to analyze the performances of these processes? Ultimately, how to improve these processes? In this course, we will use basic engineering approaches (understandable by university students of any major), including concepts from basic queuing theory, diagrammatic methodologies from computer science, and quality improvement methodologies used in industrial engineering, to shed some light on answering these questions. This course consists of lectures, group problem solving, in-class discussion, as well as a student-centered project (group work). Students will have opportunity of self-directed learning and team-work experience.
