Universities around the world promote projects where students must design, innovate, build, repair and improve prototypes from different areas: robotics, electronics, mechanics or the conjugation of all areas, even management is the most applied area implicit in processes but not recognized by the empirical way in which they apply it.
With the permission of the readers and with the intention that in each of us there remains a seed of curiosity, I am going to present a case study: the BAJA SAE team of the Universidad Simón Bolívar, Venezuela. BAJA SAE USB, is a student group of the Simón Bolívar University that participates every year in a competition organized by SAE, its acronym in English Society of Automotive Engineers in United States of America, the competition is to design and build a rustic prototype in which evaluates design, costs and performance.
As students, as young professionals, as senior professionals, we learn from organizations that management is for managers or for those who are aspiring to positions with supervisory responsibilities. We realize that management is not just for managers when we can see up close how engineering students are organized (referring to the case study), to form a team with the goal of designing and building: the prototype of the year for the next competition.
Intuitively they have been organized since its inception, without knowing that they apply management in the purest and simplest:
1.- Firstly, they are organized by areas of competence: management, brakes, suspension, transmission, electronics and chassis, similar to a company structured by processes, they work in parallel and together to mesh the particularities and benefits of the prototype.
2.- They carry out performance evaluations by their peers, by their advising professors, by their ex-members and weigh their work. In other words, the best practices of human resources use the 360 ° evaluation.
3.- They welcome new members and involve them in different areas, in order to awaken interest and empathy for the prototype. They are taught basic tasks such as: welding, grinding, designing, among others. Empirically they try to preserve knowledge in their organization over time. Modern management: management or knowledge management.
4.- The BAJA SAE USB team opens its doors to students of production engineering, mechanics, electronics or any other career offered at USB, forming multidisciplinary work teams and outlining objectives to achieve a common goal: The new prototype.
5.- They manage inventory, costs, time, human resources, risks, quality. What do they do? They manage a project.
6.- They run for office, present a proposal, set out their objective and vote. They carry out evaluations of their capacities, abilities, attitudes, knowledge, that is, they value their strengths and weaknesses, simulating a Personnel Evaluation Center.
7.- Upon returning from each competition, they evaluate failures, technical errors, human errors, propose new ideas, new methodologies, new ways of communicating. They apply change management, they get involved, they dare to propose changes and they risk being wrong.
8.- They contact large, small and medium-sized companies, shops, shopping centers, prepare advertising material, display the prototype, their achievements, their expectations, all to raise funds for the construction of the new rustic prototype. They market a product.
The management is in our day to day, in the programs of the universities there are subjects dedicated to management, however sometimes they exemplify difficult cases to understand, as you can see teaching management to students is simple, there is no need for an evil boss, nor a cloudy situation, it is only necessary to open our minds and find within our students the managerial skills that will help them develop in their future, as teachers our mission is to offer them tools to develop as people, as professionals and as managers.
I invite you all to go back to your universities and get interested in the projects that the students work very hard, most of the time the universities do not have the budget to support high-performance academic projects, however the students manage sponsorships of all kinds: monetary, tools, uniforms, courses, consultancies, etc., in exchange they go to another country and represent the flag of our countries.
I dedicate these lines to the BAJA SAE USB team as they express it: for those who were part of it, for those who are part of that great team today and for those who have the courage to be part of something important and take the risk of making mistakes or succeed against all odds.
I invite you to support and sponsor these young Venezuelans who manage with so little experience, I also invite you to contact and follow them:
Let's teach management, let's train good managers. Let's break paradigms and create student management.
