Building an Operations Management Department from Nowhere to Here: Lessons Learned

The seed of the phenomenal growth of the Operations Management area at the School of Management at The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) was planted in 1996 when the search committee successfully recruited Professor Hasan Pirkul to be its new dean. At his hiring, Pirkul, then a professor of Computer Information Systems at Ohio State University, negotiated some funds from the university for the school's growth. After settling down in his new job for a year and assessing the school's needs, he decided to recruit senior faculty in some areas in 1997. In the Operations Management (OM) area, he made me an offer. He mentioned during my interview that he would like me to contribute to building the school in general and the OM Department in particular. I found this aspect exciting and challenging, and it was a primary reason for me to accept the offer and move to UTD as an Ashbel Smith Professor of OM in September 1997. At that time, there were only two professors in operations research and only one in qualitative operations management. The school was primarily an evening school with a 4-course teaching load and no doctoral program in OM! Yes, there was much to build, but given what we had to begin with, we could not believe in our wildest imagination that we would be what we are today! What has been achieved is not short of a miracle, and this article is a post-mortem of how we did it. In 1996, the UTD's School of Management, now Naveen Jindal School of Management (JSOM), was ranked 61 in the top 100 schools according to The UTD Top 100 Business School Research RankingsTM (Fig. 1). This ranking, based on a selection of 24 peer-reviewed journals considered top business school academic journals, has arguably become a gold standard of research rankings of business schools. A worldwide ranking of 100 top business schools based on a 5-year rolling horizon is announced yearly. In 2023, the Jindal School ranked number 2. Figs. 1 and 2 also contain the rankings and scores of UPenn's Wharton, NYU's Stern, MIT's Sloan, Stanford's GSB, UChicago's Booth, and INSEAD (France + Singapore). Fig. 2 shows that UPenn's Wharton is way ahead of the other universities in terms of the score on which the ranking is based. Fig. 3 shows the Global MBA Research of business schools by the Financial Times. In this ranking, UTD's Jindal ranked number 5 as reported for 2023. While this ranking is arrived at differently than The UTD Top 100 Business School Research RankingsTM, we include it in this article for completeness. This article focuses on the growth of the Operations Management area at the Jindal School. Since The UTD Top 100 Business School Research RankingsTM is interactive, we can rank business schools by any subset of the 24 journals for any selected range of years. For this article concerning the growth of the OM Department at the Jindal School, we selected five OM and OM-related journals -- Production and Operations Management (POM), Manufacturing & Service Operations Management(M&SOM), Journal of Operations Management (JOM), Management Science (MS), and Operations Research (OR). We see from Fig. 3 that the Jindal School was ranked 150, far below 100, in 1996 based on the five years 1992-1996. It is ranked 1 based on the five years 2019-2023. This growth rate over 27 years is phenomenal. Fig. 4 also contains the rankings of UPenn's Wharton, NYU's Stern, MIT's Sloan, Stanford's GSB, UChicago's Booth, and INSEAD (France + Singapore). These schools, along with the Jindal School, are chosen as they are the top 7 in the 2019-2023 rankings.These ranks in Fig. 2 are based on the publication scores of a school's faculty members in these five journals. While POM, M&SOM, and JOM are primarily OM journals, MS and OR also represent business school areas other than OM. Arguably, the proportion of OM papers in these journals may not have changed much over the years. Thus, the publications in these five journals can serve as a good proxy for ranking the schools in OM. It is also possible that some OM publications in these journals are by the faculty in that school in departments other than the OM department. Also, some schools may not have a separate OM department. So, these ranks could be considered based on the growth of OM research rather than the growth of the OM department in a school. The following section provides more detail on the rankings. Section 3 gives the history of the Jindal school. Section 4 discusses the school's strategy after Hasan Pirkul joined the school's dean in 1996. Section 5 lays out the factors responsible for the growth of the OM Department. Section 6 concludes.