Spreadsheet Models for Managers

Problem Solving

Constructing a model of a business process is a form of problem solving. The problem solving you'll have to do in this course might be a little different from your previous experiences.

onstructing a model of a business process is a form of problem solving. When you make a model, you usually want to know the answer to a questions such as "How much cash will we need to start this business?" or "When will we have to hire people to support this contract?" In this course, you'll get some practice with solving this sort of problem. Each week, we present a set of problems designed to give you opportunities to use the techniques we cover in that week.

In your past experiences with solving problems, you often had hints and cues that you could use to help you find the solutions. For example, right after you learned how to factor polynomials, the problems that were presented involved applying the technique you had just learned, and the problems were directly analogous to the textbook examples. These cues helped a lot when you had to solve the homework problems.

But in real-life situations, the problems you solve are vague — you don't really know what's needed to answer the question, and very likely, the question raises some issues you've never faced before. Our homework problems are intended to simulate that situation, to give you practice for the real thing. Each homework problem is focused on some portion of the new material we cover in that week. Solving that problem will require that you use that new technique, possibly in combination with methods we covered previously.

Often, though, rote application of what you saw in class won't be enough — you'll have to be a tiny bit inventive, a tiny bit creative, to solve the homework problems. Sometimes you'll have to take what we showed you in the class demonstrations and extend it some way. This characteristic of our homework problems is designed to give you practice with the experience of making business models in real situations.

Some students view this approach as "unfair." Some feel that homework problems should be solvable by rote application of what we presented in class. We take a different position. We feel that it's our responsibility to prepare you for the real world, and in the real world, you sometimes have to be inventive and creative in the way that you apply what you know. Our goal in this course isn't only to teach you the techniques we cover, but to give you practice in using them, to enable you to apply them to real situations. And since real situations almost never fit exactly with what we cover in class, you need to know how to adapt what you've learned here to fit your needs later. Giving you opportunities to solve the homework problems by adapting what we show you is the best way we know to prepare you for success in business modeling.