Hiring Plan / Budget Game

This Excel spreadsheet game was designed by Dr. E. Scott Bair to be used at an overnight departmental retreat his department took in October 2001. The goal of the retreat was to come up with a Hiring Plan. At that time, the department was contemplating hiring three new faculty into fully funded positions. As should be expected in a group of 25 faculty, there were strong, diverse opinions about what the research areas of the new hires should be. The spreadsheet game was the vehicle he used to determine what common ground was held by the faculty and what new or complimentary research strands they considered the most important. An additional factor in the deliberations was the flexibility to turn one of the faculty lines into lines for two technicians. He wanted to determine how universal the desire for additional technical staff was among the faculty.

The idea behind the Hiring Plan / Budgeting Game was to have the faculty create an entire new department—as if they were forming one from the ground up at the new campus of the University of California at Merced. For this task, the group should be organized in teams of 4 or 5 people.

Game Excel file (Excel 35kB Mar1 05)
Author's Notes on Using the Game (Microsoft Word 29kB Mar1 05)