ProductProject Management

This term at MBS I was planning to take a marketing course titled Product Management run by a visiting professor from the United States by the name of Debi Mishra. Unfortunately, he's fallen very ill (i.e. spending the American summer in hospital) and, as such, has not been able to fly to Melbourne to run the course. Apparently, according to the powers that be with MBS, there's no one within the school (or indeed, within Australia) qualified to run an MBA course in Product Management, and as such, the school's had to cancel the subject.

This puts me in a difficult position. Since we're already six weeks into the term, I can only choose a replacement subject from the handful of intensive subjects on offer during the second half of the term. My choices:

• Marketing in Asia
  
• Negotiations
  
• Channels of Distribution
  
• Project Management
  
• Organisation Design

"Normally" I would ave chosen Channels of Distribution (another marketing subject) instead, as it was my second preference after Product Management when I was originally selecting my electives. However, thise course was also going to be conducted by Debi Mishra, and is now being run by Richard Speed, my professor for Marketing Management from term 1. In a creative and occassionally abstract discipline like marketing, I believe it is important to leverage off the experiences and insights of as many professors as possible. As such, while Channels would probably be a brilliant course, I don't want to do it with Richard Speed.

So ... I'm going to switch to Project Management (drop the "du", insert a "j" and an "e"). The professor, Paul Adler, is meant to be brilliant, it's an area in which I have some experience, so I'll be able to contribute to the class, and it finishes about a week before I fly out to NZ/NY.

One caveat: it's run in superintensive mode - I'll be giving up my Tuesday and Thursday evenings AND my Saturday mornings for a period of five weeks - and that's just the class time - there's also three HBS cases to prepare each week. Aaaaghhh, when will this all end?!?