HW2_NguyenLinh

IE 4320 Fundamentals of Systems HW2 Out of 6 points (6% of Course Grade) Due: Monday, March 6 by 11:59pm CST – Upload to Blackboard through Assessments tab Please see below for the formatting requirements of this assignment. The questions and the point totals start on the next page.  Your assignment responses should be typed in Times New Roman, 10-12 size font, single or 1½ line spaced, one inch margins all around, and justified (both left and right/Ctrl+J). Page orientation can be either “Portrait” or “Landscape” and can vary by page.  You may use no more than 6 pages total for your assignment (excluding references, and title page and table of contents, if used). Please note the varying point totals of the questions and structure space accordingly in your assignment.  You are allowed to use outside sources (references) to back up your points, if applicable. If outside sources are used, they must be included in a reference list at the end of the assignment and also cited at point of use in your assignment response. Also, if you take a direct quote from any source, including a website or the course textbook, the quoted material must be placed in quotation marks and the source must be cited at the point of use, e.g., Project management is “the planning, organizing, directing, and controlling of company resources for a relatively short-term objective that has been established to complete goals and objectives. Furthermore, project management utilizes the systems approach to management by having functional personnel (the vertical hierarchy) assigned to a specific project (the horizontal hierarchy) (Kerzner, 2017, p. 4).  You must type and/or use drawing or other software tools for all of your assignment responses – scans or photos of handwritten answers are not acceptable. The acceptable file formats are doc, docx, and (non- scanned) pdf only.  Your file should be named "HW2_YourLastNameYourFirstName". For example, for me, this would be “HW2_CrossJennifer”.  Please remember to double-check your file before you submit it. If you submit the wrong file (or an incorrectly formatted file) and want to submit a replacement file later, this will result in at minimum a late grade adjustment (please see the syllabus for information on late grade adjustments) and could result in the loss of all credit for the assignment (i.e., if you submit the replacement file outside the allowable late period – again see the syllabus). The only exception to this would be if you notice this error and email us the replacement file before 02/28/2022 11:59pm CST. This assignment is an individual assignment, and all work in the assignment must be your own. Any discussion with or copying of work from other students, or other outside source (without appropriate citation), is an academic integrity violation. Following the policy in the syllabus, this will result in both reporting this violation to the Office of Student Conduct and zero credit for the entire assignment (if this violation is confirmed by the Office of Student Conduct). Additional academic action, such as failure in the course, could result from particularly egregious violations. Best of luck on this assignment and please let me know if you have any questions! TTU IE 4320 Fundamentals of Systems IMSE Department Homework #2 Spring 2023 °

1. (2 points total, 70% content, 30% communication quality). Take some time and imagine the “perfect work environment” for you as an industrial engineer working professional, that is, the one that you believe would enable you to produce the most productive (e.g., the innovative, highest quality, and timely) outcomes. You may scan and attach the figure you drew in class and it will not count towards your page limit. a. List as many descriptors (hint: these will typically be adjectives or short phrases) as you can to characterize this environment. If you believe any of the descriptors is too generic to adequately convey what you mean to another person reading this (i.e., the instructor or grader), add a brief explanation such as a short example. - Having a coffee machine - Have lots of windows in the office - The surrounding of the company must at least have trees or mountains - Having trainings programs for employees - Frequent communication between supervisor and employees so that employees can receive feedbacks and know what they need to improve - Employees recognition - Having work-life balance for employees - A diverse workplace where all employees are respected, and their voices are heard without their backgrounds. - A company put safety first in all their processes and always try their best to improve and design a safe place for worker. b. Now, complete one of the following: i. If you do not have professional work experience related to industrial engineering (e.g., internship, co-op, previous full-time job), interview a person who is currently working (or has worked in the recent past) as an industrial engineer and ask them to describe their current (or most recent) work environment. Compare and contrast that experience to your “perfect work environment”? How do you believe working in the environment the individual described would impact your productivity, if at all? -I interviewed a person that used to work as an IE in a global company before he comes back to school to get his Ph.D. He describes his typical day is going out to the field, taking to different departments, sometimes watching the processes and do time study, motion study, then reported back to his supervisor. He said he really loved working there since his supervisor and coworkers were making the environment more enjoyable to work. They were really respected him and always encouraged him to express his ideas, his thought. Also, the company itself encouraged employees to attend 1 to 2 trainings per year to networking with other facilities and also expand the skills and knowledge. -For me, after talking to him, the similar things in my perfect environment and his environment is that we aim to choose the company that value their employees, promote the fair treatment and full participation of all people. Because if the company don’t have the respect for their employees, how can we know if our works will be considered or not? He didn’t mention much about the surroundings (like it has to have tree or mountains as me) since for him, the people that he work with will mainly determine his creative, his TTU IE 4320 Fundamentals of Systems IMSE Department Homework #2 Spring 2023 °

I was comfortable when doing the poem since in our middle and high school program back in Vietnam, we need to learn lots of poems and also write essays about the meaning in each sentences so I feel quite easy when writing it and did not encounter any emotional blocks. c. Also discuss: Why did you select this task instead of the other task in part a? How do you think you would have felt had you attempted the other task instead? I chose the poem instead of the lamp because if I choose to depiction of lamp, it’d take me hours to finish it since I don’t have the artistic eyes and good vocabularies to describe it, so the poem was a safe choice for me. d. Double-loop learning: What you did learn about problem-solving and/or systems thinking from this exercise? What changes you would recommend to the structure or content of this exercise that you think you would have enhanced your learning? I learned about problem solving skill in this exercise since I need to create a poem and it made me think about what topic should I write about and how I should generate it. 3. (2 points total, 70% content, 30% communication quality). Find a person (e.g., friend, roommate, family member) in a different profession than you are (i.e., not Industrial Engineering). The person should have sufficient experience in the profession to know a good deal about it (i.e., typically you would not select a person in their first 1-2 years of study unless they also have work experience or other relevant experience in the profession). Your goal will be to ask a series of questions – and only questions - in order to learn more about the profession and to isolate a specific problem in the profession. That is, general problems such as “medical care for the elderly is inadequate” are not sufficient for the purposes of this assignment. Continue the questioning until you have isolated a very specific problem, such as “the sight of a Novocain needle scares people”. Do not be surprised if it takes quite a bit longer than you expect to reach this point. a. Describe the problem that you isolated : reusing produced water from hydrocarbon recovery processes for oil and gas industry b. List each question you asked verbatim, and briefly summarize the other person’s answer. ( Hint: you will probably find it very helpful to record your conversation in order to support this purpose). Note: this list of questions and answers does NOT count toward the assignment page limit. The person I interview is a senior Petroleum Engineering studentand he also have a Bachelor and Master’s in chemical engineering. - How do PE choose the location to build an offshore oil rig? He said that this will be mainly geologists jobs since they will study the structure and rock layers underneath the desirable location to see if they have a potential of oil and natural gas. - How long does it take to build one oil rig? The time it takes to build is around two or three years on average. - How do you transfer it to the location? The engineers will build it at port cities then towed it out to the sea. It’s then anchored down to the sea bottom or placed above concrete or steel legs which are directly anchored down. -How do the engineers make sure the drilling is safe without any leaking to the environment since I just learned about the Deepwater oil spill in the Safety class and do you discharge anything back to the ocean after the process? He said that incident happened due to a rise of pressure from natural gas blew out the wellhead TTU IE 4320 Fundamentals of Systems IMSE Department Homework #2 Spring 2023 °

and it took them several months to dig relief wells to plug the hole. He told that for sure the people will calculate and the standard to have a safe drilling, and right now, they have a challenges in reusing produced water from hydrocarbon recovery processes (he said it’s part of the normal oil process and do not want to go in deep since I’ll not understand). It’s the challenge because the cost of treatment is really high plus they need to have different treatments for different types of produced water in order to reusing. c. Discuss each of the following: i. What difficulties did you encounter in the questioning process? The challenge I encountered is to create the questions because I have no knowledge about oil & gas so it took me some time to generate the questions. ii. Did you notice any differences in the way the other responded that depended on the “type” of question that you asked? If yes, why do you think this occurred? If no, why do you think there was no difference in this specific context? I do not think I encounter any differences in this context since he answered me using terms that I can understands so it’s similar between these answers. iii. If you were to do this exercise all over again, what would you do differently? If I can do it again, I may research a little bit about the field that the interviewee is expertise on because with that, I can continue the conversation and may can ask more related questions. d. Double-loop learning: What you did learn about problem-solving and/or systems thinking from this exercise? What changes you would recommend to this problem structure or content that you think you would have enhanced your learning? With this exercise, it allows me to generate sets of questions that I need to ask the person and also how to create follow up questions based on what they answer. TTU IE 4320 Fundamentals of Systems IMSE Department Homework #2 Spring 2023 °