last of 4

About this Course

MBA 620 Financial Decision Making is the second course in a sequence of courses toward earning your MBA. In MBA 610 you became familiar with personal career development, leadership self-evaluation, situation auditing, and organizational culture, climate, and ethics. MBA 620 will build on these skills while using course projects to explore the concepts behind financial statements, pricing, cost analysis, and capital budgeting techniques of organizations.

This course will not only require you to think critically, but will also challenge your analytic abilities in managing real-world scenarios, positioning you as the decision maker for some well-known national and international brands. Projects in the course will serve as a deep dive into financial decision making on a variety of economic, financial, and accounting topics to enhance your knowledge and understanding in these areas. By the completion of this course, you will have the ability to make excellent financial decisions.

Project 1: Analyzing Financial Statements (2 weeks)

Project 2: Managerial Economics (2 weeks) *Team Project*

Project 3: Costing and Cost Allocations (2 weeks)

Project 4: : Time Value of Money and Annuities (2 weeks)

Project 5: Cost of Capital, Risk/Return, and Capital Budgeting (2 weeks)

About Project-based Learning

This course is part of a program of study designed to prepare you for academic and career success. UMGC designed the courses in this program around an innovative approach to learning that is relevant, practical, and enjoyable. Throughout your program, you will practice the knowledge, skills, and attitudes (hereafter collectively referred to as competencies) that employers require of individuals working in your discipline. Together, core competencies and discipline-specific competencies create a competency profile for your program.

Core competencies are communications, critical thinking, quantitative reasoning, and leadership/teamwork, which employers consider foundational for any career. Discipline-specific competencies are defined as the highly targeted knowledge, skills, and attitudes required of an expert in your field of study. Proficiency is defined as meeting performance requirements, as explained in the Grading Information section of this syllabus.

You will begin your program of study by concentrating on the core competencies of communications, critical thinking, quantitative reasoning, and leadership/teamwork in the first course in your program. Becoming proficient in the core competencies is vital to your future program success.

As you progress through the beginning, developing, and mastery stages of your program, you will draw on your core competencies while you add and become proficient in discipline-specific competencies. To successfully complete your program of study, you will be required to demonstrate acceptable proficiency in all competencies associated with your program’s competency profile—both core and discipline-specific.

You will demonstrate your proficiency in a competency by engaging in project-based learning (PBL). The projects within this and all courses in your program require you to immerse yourself in scenarios that draw upon workplace-oriented questions and challenges. You will often work over an extended period as you employ multiple competencies to respond to a scenario and prepare a deliverable similar to one you might be required to produce during your career.

Projects generally have multiple steps and may require participation in related discussions, classroom assessment techniques, self-reflections, and supplemental learning activities that inform the evaluation of project performance. Projects and their related competencies are similar to the assignments and their related learning outcomes you have encountered in other programs; they are simply more integrated and work-relevant. Projects have required due dates to reinforce the importance of meeting deadlines, as required in the workplace.

The integration of core and discipline-specific competencies, presented multiple times over your program of study, provides you with opportunities to practice and improve. Achieving acceptable levels of proficiency for all competencies within a course and across a program improves your mastery and your ability to apply your knowledge, skills, and attitudes beyond the classroom.

As one of your main courses in your MBA program, this course has been designed to help integrate the financial, economics and managerial accounting knowledge with the different subject areas you have studied so far in the MBA program, including PRO 600. Our perspective throughout will be to view organizations from the perspective of a Chief Financial Officer or a VP of Finance. However, your role in each project is of a freelance consultant, part of a team assigned to turn around a firm in financial difficulty. When we look at a financial decision problem, we will attempt to develop a comprehensive business solution rather than a financing solution, investing solution, or an operations solution. It is important for your learning and for the success of the course that you participate actively and fully throughout. This will entail doing each week's readings in advance, doing the project milestones on time, personal contemplation, and eventually relating the subject matter to current events. Some of the milestone, may be just exercises and problems that will help you digest new tools and technics.

To facilitate your learning experience, we have developed a set of material each week and, each week we will ask you to apply what you have learned to your course projects. Taken together, these mutual supporting educational tools will maximize your learning, retention, and ability to apply what you have learned. 

We expect much of the learning in the course to come from synthesizing what you learn from the readings, videos, supporting PPTs, and if required doing exercises and problems as mid-step between the reading and the project, participating in discussion in the ELM classroom, instructor feedback, and applying the concepts, tools, and techniques of financial decision making to everyday decision problems at work.

Please read the syllabus in its entirety and visit other areas of the classroom – give particular attention to the schedule of the course at the end of the syllabus where you have all the milestone and due dates. For now, make sure that you have reviewed the readings.  To get a head start, it will be useful to begin reading and viewing all organizational aspects of the course. Also, review all the projects in their entirety so you can have a good idea of the course map.

As you recall from your Project 2 in MBA 610, you did a Situation Audit of your own company or of a firm of your choice. You already have a firsthand experience in this program analyzing critical resources in step 7 of that project including financial resources. Obviously in this MBA 620 course, we are going to dive deeper so you can fully grasp and master the tools and technics that you are going to need throughout this program after MBA 620. The concepts and theories in this course are needed for a successful completion of your MBA 670 capstone course but also in MBA 640 or even MBA 630 where you are dealing with corporate information.

All 5 projects in this course are related and/or inter-connected. Project 1 will be setting up the background of all remaining projects and you will be asked to assess the financial health of a company by focusing exclusively in the Balance Sheet and Income Statement. Project 2 (team project) and Project 3 focus exclusively in company’s current operating profitability or short-term operational efficiency, with project 2 concentrating in revenues and project 3 in cost. Project 4 and 5 focus primarily in the balance sheet, with project 4 concentrating in Assets and Project 5 in Liability and Equity. Each new project will start where you ended the previous one and all projects will be referring to the initial one. Once you have competed your last project, you will be having a more resilient and financially stress-free company.

Additionally, I strongly recommend that you keep up with the pace of the course and do all your Milestones and/or mid-project assignment in the week where the particular milestone may be due. This is critical as this course is particularly intense and you cover 3 distinct and related subjects: Economics of the Firm, Managerial Accounting, and Corporate Finance. The philosophy behind the milestone is to encourage you to submit your assignments when they are due and not fall behind. For that reason, you are required to submit your milestone or assignment only during the week it is due while all milestones remain optional. In other words, if you are going to submit a milestone, you can only submit during the week where it is due – between Wednesday 00:01 am and Tuesday 11:59 pm. If you have project 2, Step 4 milestone due in week 3 then you should submit it only in week 3 and not submit it in week #4 where the entire project 2 is due. This rule is going to be reinforced and you need to understand that there is no milestone submission once we are in the week where the project is due. Likewise, once we move to a new project there is no milestone from previous project that you can submit. Your cooperation on this matter is highly appreciated and I do hope it is going to encourage you to stay on top of all projects – including your team project (project 2) that is starting in week 3 and will be requiring from you the fullest participation in order to receive a grade. Any student that is not effectively contributing to the group project will be failing the course.

Last but not least, I have 2 more pieces of advice. I strongly recommend that you brush up the skill you have acquired in PRO 600 Project 4 Conduct Quantitative Reasoning using Data where you learned manipulating data using Excel. It is going to be invaluable for every single project in MBA 620 that you will be submitting in Excel. Keep in mind that all your Excel Spreadsheets need to have required cells with formulas and calculations – you should not be providing a plain number as a solution. And for those who would like to better understand how a Balance Sheet and Income Statement are put together using basic principles of accounting, please watch the video How to Prepare an Income Statement and a Balance Sheet (Accounting University 8:28).

In case of any questions, please do not hesitate to post a question in your ELM course to your instructor or e-mail.

So, let's shake hands (virtually) to signify our partnership in this learning journey. Best wishes for an exciting and challenging MBA 620 semester.