14 November 2018
When I heard about the Production Game for the first time in the academic welcome session, little did I know that I would be spending a lot of my time working on it. It is one of the most happening academic events in the Business School.
The Production Game is an event where students from the Masters' in HRM, IHRM, Management, IBEM, and 91´óÉñ compete against each-other to produce and deliver good quality cards. This may sound easy, but it takes a lot of teamwork, patience, critical thinking, and determination to figure out a strategy and implement it on the day of trading. The game is divided into multiple stages and begins with everyone getting into teams. This is a good opportunity to interact with your classmates because team allocation takes place in the first few weeks of term, when we didn’t really know each other yet.
Once the teams are decided, the challenge to win the production game begins. Before the actual day of trading, another important activity that takes place is the ‘Auctioning of Site’. This is an equally fun part where teams bid for their auction sites according to their decided budgets, and the highest bidder gets the site.
17 October 2018 was the trading day that we had been waiting for for weeks. There was a lot of excitement among the students, as well as a little anxiety. Nobody knew how things would play out on that day. The event began with a briefing by the professors and you could sense the enthusiasm of the teams by the cheering in the room.
The game lasted for 2 hours and 15 minutes. Those 135 minutes generated a lot of emotions, from happiness and surprise to disappointment, stress, motivation and satisfaction. At the end of the game, the final profits and rankings of the teams were announced, followed by a wine reception.
The Production Game is a great opportunity to understand the practical side of how businesses work. From the first stage to the last, a collective team effort is required, where each member works to their maximum capacity. Formulating the strategy for the game gave us an insight into various business processes such as planning, coordinating team actions, using the resources efficiently, negotiating, managing time, focusing on the most important tasks and being creative.
Being a part of the game was fun and a good learning experience too. The game raises your awareness of the areas you need to work on, such as interpersonal skills or decision-making skills. It also gave us a peek into real-life scenarios where we as professionals will be required to make certain decisions and work in teams with people we don’t know. We were told that the Production Game is not about winning, but about the learning that we will have achieved at the end.
But of course, everybody wants to win it ?
Vinisha, MSc International Human Resource Management