We started out meeting by chatting about the ARG conference I’ve already talked about and both Simon and I thought that the day had been a really beneficial event, excellent speakers, fantastic facilities and a great opportunity to talk to others about what they were doing.
We then turned to business and more specifically our consultancy which now has a name! We will be calling the company Phoenix UK Ltd, after brainstorming on the way to London for the conference and stewing on the names we came up with. As the company specialises in turning companies around we wanted a name that helped to reflect this.
We’ve also decided on a failing business. The business will be a old-fashioned men’s clothing store, one of those tweed jacket, corduroy trouser type places that has been around for years but has fallen on hard times.
On exposing the students to the game we’ve decided to make the game and competition elements more overt (thanks to Dan Hon and Alex Moseley for the inspiration) with the students taking part in a competitive internship with the best few people being “hired” by the company and receiving prizes.
This allows us to be far more open with the assessment aspect of the course and to incorporate a leader board to help motivate students and provide formative feedback throughout the course. We were looking at having some sort of continual peer feedback based on perceived contribution (something I saw in a talk by Randy Pausch) and this would tie into the new leader board as well as performance in conference calls and presentations held throughout the course.
Where the competition element is now going to be overt we have the ability to set the students specific tasks without having to overly mask them. Things like sending groups off to do things can be handled in a direct way instead of having to come up with a convoluted reason for it. This is going to include sending them to do field research into retail best practice, taking pictures and video of things they think reflect this which they will then present to their peers to be assessed.
There will also be a final presentation to the store and consultancy board. For the board we’re hoping to get a few people in from local industry and have the groups present in an almost “Dragon’s Den” style way.
The finance aspect looks to be the primary focus of the unit upon which we will then hang the marketing and personnel issues on that, with some of them cropping up as curveballs during the duration of the game.
In order to ensure the students can deal with these arising challenges there will be a number of frontloaded “seminars” to supply them with the foundations of the relevant knowledge for them to then take away and build upon.
All in all it’s coming together slowly. Now I just have to write this stuff into the design
Posted by craigharkness 
