Take My Liberty BUSI 616 Class

Goetsch and Davis is read three chapters a week. Weeks one and two cover the foundations of total quality, the work of the quality pioneers, ethics and values, strategic planning, partnering and alliances, and quality in a global market.

Week three turns to the customer, to empowering employees and to leadership in a quality organization. Week four covers teams, communication and the training that sustains a quality culture.

Week five is the technical week: the standard quality tools, structured problem solving and statistical process control. Week six covers continual improvement, including benchmarking and related approaches, and week seven covers quality standards, implementation and the change that a quality program demands.

Week eight closes on Deming himself, with his fourteen points for management and the seven deadly diseases he warned against.

Each week also has short recorded presentations and a few assigned websites. The graded pattern is steady: one forum in each of the first two weeks, two in each of weeks three through seven and one in week eight, one applied paper in each of weeks one through seven, and the presentation in the final week.

BUSI 616 is carried as a single quality project spread across eight weeks, because the papers all apply the course to one organization and one problem chosen in week one.

The choice of problem shapes everything that follows. Something measurable and common works best, such as long hold times at a call center, rework on a production line or errors in patient billing, because later papers need data for a quality tool, a PDCA test and a control chart.

Week one's paper compares two quality thinkers whose ideas genuinely differ, so the contrast has substance, and links each to competitiveness and to a biblical principle.

The middle papers then examine the organization's partners and culture, its internal and external customers, a training needs analysis for the problem and one quality tool applied to it.

Week six walks the problem through a PDCA cycle, and week seven chooses a change model to roll out the result. The presentation in week eight gathers all of it into ten slides with talking notes.

Every thread stays inside its word band and cites a pair of journal articles alongside Goetsch and Davis and a scriptural passage, and the two replies meet the same source rule at their own, slightly shorter length. You post and submit everything yourself.

BUSI 616 work goes to someone who has led quality improvement in an organization: a quality manager, a Six Sigma black belt or a process improvement lead in manufacturing, healthcare or service operations.

That experience shows most in the applied papers. A fishbone diagram is built from causes a real team would list, a Pareto chart ranks them from realistic counts, and a control chart is set up with sensible limits and a sampling plan.

It also shows in the forums, where a thread on ISO 9001 can describe what an audit actually checks and where certification helps or merely adds paperwork.

The scriptural integration is handled with care, tied to the specific argument of each post rather than added as a closing verse.

Before anything is released, a second reader counts words and sources and checks the formatting, and because one writer keeps the course from start to finish, the project holds together.

The forum volume is the first difficulty. Thirteen threads and twenty-six replies add up to well over 15,000 words, and every one needs two scholarly sources plus the textbook and Scripture.

The doubled weeks are the second. In weeks three to seven a student writes two threads, four replies and a paper, often in the same few days.

The replies are the third, since 450 to 600 words is long enough that agreement will not fill it; each reply needs its own argument and its own sources.

The tool paper is the fourth. It is short, but the tool must actually be applied to the problem with data, not described in general terms.

The presentation is the fifth. Its timing outline gives each part a minute or more, from the problem statement to the philosophy, the tool, statistical process control and a conclusion with biblical integration, and squeezing a whole project into ten slides takes careful editing.

Week one has a forum and the theorists paper, so the course is best handed over before it opens, along with the organization and problem you want to use.

Threads arrive early in their weeks, giving you time to post before classmates need something to reply to.

Replies arrive once classmates' threads are up, and in the doubled weeks they are spaced so you are never posting four at once at the deadline.

Each applied paper arrives a few days before its week closes, building on the papers before it.

The presentation slides and talking notes are planned from week six and arrive early in week eight, leaving time for you to record it.

The quote lists the forums, each paper and the presentation as separate lines, with the presentation the largest. Joining after week one is priced from the next open item.