MT499 Unit 9 Program Outcomes Reflection Example

Method, Place, Effect: An MT499 Unit 9 Program Outcomes Reflection on the Halsey Hearing Project

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

MT499: Bachelor's Capstone in Management

Unit 9 Program Outcomes Reflection

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The Halsey Hearing project figures are composite; the program outcomes are paraphrased from the published catalog; the sources cited are real.

How This Reflection Is Organized

The Bachelor of Science in Business Administration describes outcomes in areas such as financial analysis, operations, law and ethics, people management, leadership and communication (Purdue University Global, 2026). Rather than walk through courses in catalog order, I have ranked the areas by how much each changed my capstone decision, and each section follows one pattern: the method a course taught, the place in the project where I used it, and what would have been different without it.

Finance, at the Stress Table

Finance taught me present value and, more usefully, sensitivity analysis. In Unit 5, I priced each of Halsey's three answers at a 10 percent discount rate and then broke the assumption each one depended on most. Without that step, the clinic program's $17.3 million would have won on size alone. With it, the program's value turned to minus $25.4 million when device sales eroded at 1 percent a year rather than 2, while the store brand stayed positive in two of three tests. In my project the stress tests did what Brealey et al. (2020) say sensitivity work is for: they found the forecast error that would flip the choice.

Operations, at the Capacity Row

Operations management taught me to ask what a plant can actually produce. In Unit 4, I found that Halsey's plant ran at 71 percent of capacity, leaving room for about 247,000 more pairs a year. That one row turned the own-brand case from a marketing argument into a production one, because an own brand growing past that figure needed new capacity in its third year. Without the operations course, I would have treated volume as a sales forecast with no ceiling.

The capacity row changed an argument about marketing into an argument about production.

Business Law, in the Contract

Business law taught me to read a regulation for what it requires and a contract for what it allocates. The over-the-counter rule's labeling requirements shaped the regulatory roles in the Unit 8 staffing plan, and the supply contract's renewal notice and minimum volume came from thinking about who bears which risk if the chain leaves. Without those courses, I would have written a plan with no regulatory specialists and a contract that left Halsey exposed at renewal.

Ethics, in the Advertising Clause

Ethics gave me the most specific clause in the project. Our course discussed the duty owed to buyers who cannot easily judge a product's claims, and buyers of hearing aids without an exam fit that description. That is why the Unit 8 contract forbids the chain from advertising anything beyond what testing showed the device can do. Without it, Halsey's device could have been sold with promises it could not keep, under a label Halsey did not control.

People Management, in the Staffing Table

Human resource management taught me to cost a role fully, with benefits and overhead, rather than by salary. The fourteen roles in Unit 8 total about $2.5 million a year on that basis, and the same figure appears in the decision memo, which a board can check. Kerr (1975) also shaped the reporting line: placing the retail unit under operations kept clinic and retail sales out of one person's bonus.

Leadership, in the Message Order

Change leadership taught me that who hears first matters as much as what they hear. The order in Units 6 and 8, a letter to 400 clinic accounts, then a sales briefing, then a public statement, came from that course and from the mock board, where a classmate showed that secrecy would fail. Leadership ranks below finance and operations here because it shaped how the decision is delivered rather than which decision was made.

Communication, in the Memo

Business writing taught me to put the answer first. The Unit 7 memo opens with an action, gives three numbers and ends with a request a director can approve or refuse. Earlier in the program I would have written three pages of background before the recommendation.

Where the Program Left a Gap

The program taught me to analyze public companies from their filings, but not how to estimate costs a company never publishes. Every option leaned on three private numbers: what a device costs Halsey to build, what each clinic buys, and what a supply contract would say. I covered the gap in two ways: by building each estimate from a public figure and marking it as an estimate, and by finding the break point where each estimate would change the answer, such as the 1.9 percent clinic loss at which the store brand stops paying. That approach does not replace inside data, and I would want to learn how practitioners build cost estimates from industry benchmarks. The gap is real, and the stress tests are my best answer to it rather than a solution.

References

Brealey, R. A., Myers, S. C., & Allen, F. (2020). Principles of corporate finance (13th ed.). McGraw-Hill Education.

Kerr, S. (1975). On the folly of rewarding A, while hoping for B. Academy of Management Journal, 18(4), 769-783. https://doi.org/10.2307/255378

Purdue University Global. (2026). 2026-2027 catalog. https://catalog.purdueglobal.edu/