Your operations management professor is a dedicated professor. He is a perfectionist, and passionate about his job. He joined your university in the fall of 2016, and has since then taught more than 500 students. A committed pedagogue, your professor expects to see his students demonstrate a good grasp of the knowledge he works hard to impart to them. At your university, however, he was taken aback by the large number of students’ poor scores in quizzes and final grades. Having come to the university with high expectations, the poor student performance shocked him. As an operations management professor, he lost no time to look at ways of improving his students’ achievement levels. He began by setting himself the long-term target of improving the overall student performance by 2030. He knew very well that collecting elucidating data was his necessary first task, and set about that collecting meticulously, over 16 months. His sources were discussions with his faculty-member peers, his students, and students generally. His core belief is that each student can perform well. But he knows that students are different, and therefore their performances, good or poor, have a wide diversity of causes. He knew also that to get the best out of each student, he will have to identify the root causes of the unsatisfactory performance of each.

His next move was to interrogate the root cause of the problem:

his current and former students. He ran several brain-storming sessions and surveys with them, and concluded that the main contributors of poor student performance are: manpower, material, method, and environment. He reached this conclusion in various ways. One of those was this: During the brain storming sessions, he asked the participants to select the potential causes of the problem of poor student achievement. Table below gives a breakdown of causes of low achievement. Help your professor solve the problem of poor performance, and to achieve his target of overall good performance by creating a fish-bone diagram.

CAUSES A Boring course material.

B Professor is too tough/lenient.

C Classrooms are too small.

D Course material is irrelevant in the real world.

E Students are not motivated.

F Professor does not engage with students.

G Assessment method is not clear.

H Family issue.

I Students are always sleepy.

J Noisy classrooms.

K Too much weight on final exam.

Create a fish-bone diagram and categorize each of these issues correctly, using the four Ms method. kio5