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GSB

Page history last edited by PBworks 15 years, 10 months ago

A Page for the Stanford Graduate School of Business Team

Our Team: Claudia Jimenez, Lynn Powers, Hiroshi Sasaki

Coach: Rolf Steier

Contact in GSB: Bryan McCann, Instructional Technology Manager

Project timeline:

April 23 Meet with Bryan McCann, Stanford GSB

April 30 Meet with Curt Moore, Housing Supervisor, Schwab Residential Center

Meet with some GSB students

May 02 Complete and present persona

May 16 Complete and present scenario

May 30 Complete and present project

April 23:

We visited Mr. Bryan McCann and inspected some study spaces in GSB building.

Claudia: Bryan was immensely helpful during our meeting with him. He gave us a lot of information about both the project and the GSB students and showed us several of the drawn up plans for the new buildings. As an IT person, Bryan was also able to provide us with a technology perspective that resonated with us as LDTers. He shared with us his survey finding that almost all GSB students, maybe 98%, have their own laptop. One particularly interesting story was about a new technology his team tried out. Though it seemed cool to them, no one used it because they didn't know how or want to install the necessary program. That's one lesson we definitely have to keep in mind: users like intuitive and easy technology otherwise they won't use it.

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(4/23/08 photos by Hiro)

(Lynn)

April 30:

We visited the Schwab Residential Center to inspect its study rooms and other informal learning spaces.

Mr. Curt Moore, Housing Supervisor, walked us through the center and gave us detail information as to what the center offers to GSB students. We had a chance to talk to some GSB students who were studying in a study rooms and had a brief informative dialogue as well.

The Schwab Residential Center is conveniently located just a few blocks from the Stanford Business School buildings. The Center was built in 1998 and has a Spanish resort hotel-like atmosphere. It houses 200 full-time students ---primarily first-year MBA students and 60 Executive Education participants. There are 28 study rooms in total in the room.

After our tour in the center, we used one of the study room (W 354) ourselves for brainstorming and debriefing to discuss and share what we saw and some of the key insights that we gained.

Places that we looked at:

Study rooms on the east and west side
Littlefield reading room
The class of 71 lounge (Flat panel screen TV, TiVo, DVD player)
Outdoor tables
Computer labs
An executive student’s studio
Break-down rooms

Things that we noticed/learned regarding study rooms:

Need better lighting at night - Student like bright rooms with big windows. Having an adjustable lighting switch might be good. (It would be nice to have a solar powered light system!)
A big computer monitor has been install in each study room, but the one-person desk placed in a corner of the room that the computer monitor is sitting on has not been upgraded. Concequently, the desk is too small for the monitor and it is uncomfortable to sit and study at the table.
A big table is located in the middle of a study room and seems to take up too much space.
The chairs are heavy and bulky taking up too much space.
A study room accommodates 6-8 people.
There are a white board, computer (PC), a big computer screen, 6-8 chairs and a big table in the study rooms.
Each room has a cardboard recycle bin. (Go green!)
Shared printers are placed in a printer room or right outside of study rooms.
The center has 24 hour front desk service and students can borrow equiptment.

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(4/30/08 photos by Hiro)

April 30:

We interviewed some GSB students. It was very hard to set the time to meet because GSB students are very busy! We questioned their typical one-day, study life, Group work situation, concerns for study room, and so forth. We realized their ideas for learning spaces are quite different from our (LDT students) ideas. We believe that learning space should be for creating a new idea by collaborating with cohorts, but a GSB student we interviewed, think as a mere working space, something like a work operation space... We don't think all GSB students think like that, though... (Hiro)

After gathering the information, we tried to formalize a persona for our project in one way or another...

Persona

Eric is a 24 year-old first-year GSB student at Stanford University. He used to work for a consulting firm, McKinsey & Co., as an IT business consultant. Although he dreamed of launching his own start-up business in the future, Eric realized he needed more analysis skills and networking opportunities with international business professionals to accomplish his goal. He finally decided to apply for a business school. Stanford GSB was his first choice since it is one of the best business schools in the US and is located in Silicon Valley, the perfect setting for Eric given his IT business career. Additionally, since he is a Mac user, he loves that Stanford is close to the Apple headquarters. Eric carefully put together his application, making sure it was complete and presented him accurately and favorably. His diligence paid off when he was successfully admitted to Stanford GSB.

Eight months have passed and Eric has adjusted to business school well. His schedule is packed through out the day. He gets up 7 o’clock in the morning and attend his first class at eight. He usually has two more classes during the day and has a couple of meetings in between. When he is not in a class, he goes to Jackson Library to get some books and study in a study room in the library to work on his assignments. Around 6 or 7, he goes home or goes out with his friends to have some dinner in Down Town Palo Alto. He tries to go to bed around 10:30 or 11, but ends up staying up till around 12:30 to finish his work.

He lives in on-campus housing, the Schwab Residential Center, that is exclusively for first-year GSB and a small number of executive MBA students. His campus life, especially study environment is quite nice because most classrooms he goes to are walking distance from his room, and Stanford GSB has many rich facilities for the students. He is thoroughly satisfied with it. Specifically, he likes The Knight Management Center which is located on a street across from Schwab. It has a great number of study rooms which are suitable for a group work. Most classes that he takes require a group project and the meeting spaces are in high demand. The study rooms in the Knight Management Center have an excellent reservation system; GSB students can view the space availability and can easily make a reservation online if they hope to ensure the space.

However, his hope is not always a well-developed reservation system. Since he can’t predict his exact schedule in advance, he hopes that a room is available whenever on the scene he wants to use one. Since GSB students come from wide variety of industries, their choices of classes and interests are quite diverse. Therefore, it is very hard to set the meeting time for the group project with so many different, busy schedules. GSB students highly value the location of the meeting spaces (distance from classrooms) and the number of rooms available. They don’t want to miss a meeting opportunity whenever they have some time. Generally, in the midterm or final term season, the demand for study space is very high. To solve this problem, the Knight Management Center has special moving walls for each room so that the number of rooms can change depending on the demand. Consequently, Eric has never experienced not being able to use a space in the Knight Management Center. He appreciates this system immensely and is glad it can meet his needs.

He finds many facilities, which are equipped in study rooms in the Knight Management Center, contribute to revitalize group discussions. He often uses a study room even though he studies alone, in order to concentrate on producing a new idea, or for a good change of pace. Since the study rooms in the Knight Management Center are also used for social networking purposes as well, Eric uses study rooms quite often.

*flickr photo (creative commons) licensed: Big Business At Sans Souci - honma

Dan Well done here, I really like the details that you have given Eric. This makes him feel pretty real, I'd say share trhis with Annie and the GSB team in our class to see what they think. I think his background before he came to the GSB and after is very relevant it helps us understand the attitudes and experiences of GSB students. You have included some stuff about the scneario here as well; I think the last two paragraphs fit better in the scenario piece of this proejct so I'd say just slightly reowrk them and it will fit into the narrative that you want. I recommend developing a second persona for a different kind of business student and see how she does in your space.

Scenario

Eric just finished his dinner in his room in Schwab Residential Center at 8:40pm. He had some chicken nuggets that he microwaved. Since his schedule is very busy as a first year GSB student, this kind of simple meal is quite usual. Although he has a nice kitchenette, he never uses the provided cooking appliances other than the microwave. After his meager dinner, he prepares for going out. He has a group project meeting at 9:00pm for his Evaluating Entrepreneurship Opportunity class. As an assignment he and his teammates are creating a business plan for a start-up company. They are working closely with an advisor from a prominent venture capital firm. He and his team meet frequently to come up with ideas and solutions and they report to the advisor every other week. They are planning to launch an innovative social network catering to the IT industry in Asia. Since this business concept was developed based on his idea and directly connected to his future start-up business plan, he is excited about the project.

At 8:55pm, Eric leaves the Schwab Residential Center. He walks across the street and enters Knight Management Center, which was recently built. At the entrance of the building there is a large plasma screen with a map of the first floor. He looks at the map and sees that all the study rooms have a name next to its label, meaning that it’s in use. He scans the names for someone from his group. He doesn’t see anyone, but sees one study room with the label “spice girls.” He laughs to himself and knows that his group would never call themselves the spice girls, so he heads up to the second floor. On the second floor, there is another large plasma screen, but this time with the layout of this floor. Eric again scans the study room spaces and finds one of his teammate’s names, George Taylor, listed under Room number W213 in the west wing.

When he arrives to the room, Eric suggests that they change the study room name. George agrees so Eric goes to the small monitor outside the room. He touches the screen to edit the meeting group name, types in Social Networking since that’s their meeting’s topic, and then presses enter. The meeting time length pops up. He sees that George inputted their meeting would last from 9 until 10pm, but he knows his group well, so Eric changes it to 9pm until 11pm. The reservation system makes it so that once your meeting time is over your group name will disappear from the room, making the study room appear available on the plasma screen map. Last time his group forgot to renew their study time so a group came by who wanted to use the room. Thankfully there was another room available nearby so they didn’t get kicked out, but had there not been it would have been common courtesy to let them have it. It was the policy of the new reservation system, which Eric thought was really efficient.

At 9:05pm, the rest of the group arrives. They need to finish developing their marketing strategy by the end of the night, because they have to report to their advisor tomorrow morning. The two opposite sides of the walls in the study room have very large whiteboards that span the width of both walls. Eric and the team start brainstorming by writing down their ideas all over the white board. When one of the whiteboards runs out of space, they move on to the other side. Everyone rotates their chairs, which are on wheels, to face the other side where George has started drawing up a graph. When they feel confident in their work, Eric pushes the “scan button” on the smartboard in the room to get digital images of what they’ve written on the white boards. They have come up with some good ideas, but they realize that they need some in-depth insights into the current Asian IT market. Eric proposes to talk to one of his Japanese friends, Masa, who works for C-NET Japan as an IT business journalist in Tokyo so he sets up the video-conference system in the study room. It’s already 11pm, so before beginning their conference George goes to the monitor and renews their room reservation on the monitor outside for another hour. Eric and the team thus are able to gather valuable information regarding the current trend and hot products in the Asian market through the conference call with Masa.

At 11:55 pm, Eric remains in the room although his other project members have left. He just remembered that he had another assignment due tomorrow, so he reserves the study room for another hour. He gets some fresh coffee from the kitchen on this floor, turns the circular light switch to the right to increase the brightness of the room, and then continues studying before heading home for bed.

Dan - This is a well sketched out day and I get an idea of what they are actually doing there in the space. I like how you have included what they were doing before and after their time in the room. I liked the description of how the space supports their work practices that couldn't have been predicted in advance (running out of whiteboard space, vconf with Japan). For the final project, include why the actions they are doing support learning - you wouldn't include words like "authentic activity" in a scenario, but you would want to include that in a report as you discuss interacting with someone in the field in Japan to support their project. Well done, but as with the personas, can you give us a second point of view? GSB projects are so often in teams, can you let us know what another team member might be thinking and doing?

Rolf - Great Scenario! I know we talked in class last week some, but you do a very nice job of putting the persona, Eric, into this space and seeing how he would intereact. I think its a great insight to suggest that the GSB students often learn in group meeting contexts. I would suggest you take this one step further, and think about the specific knowledge that these students might wish to learn in a study space. Is it negotiation tactics? If so, maybe the space could reflect that. The video conference element of your study space is great - but also think about what they might learn from such an interaction - and be sure to include support for this learning in your design. Really you guys are doing great work, I'm excited to see your designs!

Initial sketch