Critical Thinking 1
Scheduling Play Time at the Golf Course.
Link to a news item discusses golf course bottlenecks and delves into the question: How long should it take to play a round of golf? the time it takes to play a round of golf depends on process design and production scheduling. It is just a question of how good or bad your own game is. Variability in player talent becomes a problem. A good player can finish his/her round quickly. But for not so good player, it is going to take longer on the course.
News Item: The Real Causes of Slow Play (at the Golf Course) (on the attachment)

Write brief but well-thought out answers to the questions below:

Discuss the scheduling / sequencing tools discussed in the text be used to alleviate the customer service (and revenue) problem at a golf course?
Can the concept of Drum-Buffer-Rope (in Theory of Constraints section) be applied to this situation? Explain how.

Critical Thinking 2

The Burden of Bad Design.
Some designs of products and services are inherently bad. Donald Norman has published several well-regarded books on design – The Design of Everyday Things, Turn Signals are the Facial Expressions of Automobiles, Things that Make Us Smart, among others. On his website, he offers his perspective on why a certain product (in this case, headphones) has an inherently bad design:

News Item 1: A Great Product Ruined (Links to an external site)
Additional examples of bad designs can be found on Internet. One website is listed below:
News Item 2: Examples of Bad Designs (Links to an external site)

Critically analyze the information contained in the aforementioned news items. Then write well-thought out answers to the questions below:

Make a list of the factors that make a design bad or unworkable.
Nominate one product/service candidate for bad design from products/services that were introduced in 2015 or later (include its name and image). Then offer justification on why this product/service rates low on the design factors that were identified in Q1.

(Please note that the Tesla’s Cybertruck is excluded from consideration, because enough has already been written in the press for/against its design features.)

Discussion

Scheduling in Healthcare Settings
For your discussion, I am attaching links to two news articles from Wall Street Journal: the first one titled ‘The Informed Patient’ discusses scheduling in hospital ORs for surgeons. The second one titled ‘The Doctor Will See You Eventually’ discusses open-access scheduling for patients in family physician’s office and provides insights on scheduling best-practices in healthcare setting. Provide your opinion on what your learned from it in context of implications for scheduling in healthcare operations.

News Item 1: The Informed Patient (clicking this link will download the article as a PDF file)
News Item 2: The Doctor Will See You Eventually (clicking this link will download the article as a PDF file)
Both on the attachment