Course Planning

I’m toying with a case study on planning a new college course with Tinderbox. It’s not simply that professors are a big Tinderbox market (though they are), but also that the work strikes me as a reasonable placeholder for a bunch of things that arise in the business world:

• Planning a trade show or internal sales conference
• Managing a new product launch or special promotion
• Planning and managing a major software product release
• Running a local political campaign

The first two map fairly directly onto course planning. The software product release is more of a stretch, but the underlying resource management questions are similar – especially when the release date is fixed in advance. You’ve got (say) 14 weeks. You know what you want to cover. You know what you’ve got to cover – things you can’t skip because everyone expects you to cover them. Unexpected things happen: a guest lecturer falls into your lap, a developer says “Look! I stayed later last night and finished the whole feature, which turned out to be a lot easier than we thought!” Or, you spend a lecture talking about the term paper, and the dev team stalls out for a week to fix a bug nobody knew existed, Either way, you’ve got familiar issues.

I’ve always thought Tinderbox would be a terrific tool for people running for Town Council or for managing a small-town mayoral race. If you’re gearing up for something like this, Email me. We should talk.