A Heuristic Approach to Grouping and Timetabling of Project Presentations of Student Teams

A key requirement of the Introduction to Management course at Sabancı University, is the preparation of a business plan. About 40 teams present their business plans. Teams present in groups of 3 or 4, and all members of the teams in a group are required to be in the audience when other teams of their group present. Teams of judges used for different groups may change. MGMT 201 is taken students from different colleges and classes (sophomore, junior, etc). Three key goals defined the need for the current work. Firstly, as judges inevitably grade presentations relative to each other, we would like to have each group of teams to reflect the academic diversity (college, GPA, class) present in the course. The second goal is to have teams with the same type of business plans (e.g. retail, manufacturing, or services) assigned to the same group. The third goal is related to the timing of the presentations. It is not desirable to schedule all the presentations after 6:30 PM when students do not have any classes. This creates a timetabling problem where only certain day time–slots are feasible for certain teams.