Significant portions of lecture time are spent providing students with techniques, insights, and guidelines for conducting this type of analysis. Our experience shows that introducing the students to a report request template helps them produce thorough and high quality report proposals. Insights from Teaching the Course Teaching this course is a lot of fun and a lot of work. Still, I had to cut out some planned material since the topics proved richer and more challenging than anticipated. I have no doubt at this point that management reporting systems is a topic that deserves and requires the time frame of a full course.
Students find that mastering modern report-generator software is very rewarding.
Some students experience difficulties with the more advanced features such as two-pass reports, conditional totals, conditional band lines, and accumulation frequency options for total fields. It was interesting to observe that a few students with strong procedural programming background had a tougher time adapting to non-procedural aspects such as generating totals at multiple levels of aggregation. The cases and the group project challenged graduate and undergraduate students alike. These assignments require creative integration of technology and business understanding, exercising virtually everything the students have learned and experienced. The task of grading the cases was eased considerably by imposing the use of a report proposal template.