Management Consulting Projects

A Step-by-Step Experiential Guide

Ronald Cook, Michael Harris, Dennis Barber III

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032005157
• eBook ISBN: 9781000426625
• Edition: 6
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This textbook provides students with an easy to use, proven roadmap for completing a successful consulting project from start to finish.

Primarily designed for students who work as outside consultants on solving client problems and investigating potential opportunities, the textbook's structure first explains the consulting process to students and then depicts it in a chronological flow, using real-life examples to demonstrate practical application. Each section builds upon the previous one, focusing on the development of critical thinking, problem solving, and communication skills for employability. Now in its sixth edition, this text has been fully revised to bring it up to date with the current business context and global environment, including:

• A major expansion of the tools and resources needed for students to conduct research on a client's situation.
• A new final chapter that ties the overarching consulting process together and focuses on how the student should use this experience for their own professional development.
• New examples of award-winning projects to provide practical guidance.
• Fresh material on the use of new technologies in the consulting process, ethics and data management, and remote working.

This well-renowned model promotes a conceptual understanding of the consulting process and the interactions between and among students, the team, the client, and the instructor. Management Consulting Projects should be essential reading for experiential Business Consulting modules, Small Business Management, and Strategic Management at postgraduate and MBA level.

1 Experiential learning using consulting

Abstract
In this chapter, you will find a definition of experiential student team consulting, a discussion of the importance of experiential learning, an explanation of the different types of consulting, a conceptual framework, the purpose of fieldwork, and considerations of confidentiality and ethics.

Definition

Student team consulting has become an invaluable experiential learning program for undergraduate and graduate business students at or near the completion of their academic careers. In 1971, Rutgers University established one of the first programs of its kind in the United States, the Rutgers MBA Team Consulting Program (Rutgers, 2003). In 1972, the Small Business Institute^® (SBI) program began as a cooperative venture between colleges and universities and the U.S. Small Business Administration. At its peak, fieldwork, as it was commonly called, grew to encompass over 400 schools (Matthews, 1998). A number of other institutions continue to provide similar offerings of experiential student team consulting as a multi-discipline, capstone course or as an integral part of another course. These field experiences, some required, others elective, allowed students to integrate their academic and life skills in a problem-solving or consulting endeavor with real clients who will benefit from the solutions developed.

Fieldwork is faculty-guided, experiential student consulting. What is meant by that? In part, this process can be explained by telling what it is not. It is not an internship where a student works under someone’s direct supervision for “x” hours a week, academic credit, and, perhaps, pay. It is not a hypothetical project or case that may be in a textbook. Fieldwork involves an actual client and a real situation. It can best be described by picturing a company hiring an outside consultant. The consultant needs to understand the issues facing the client, devise a contract with the client, and then execute the contract. When a consultant begins to work with a client, all the needed information may not be available, and what is available can be inaccurate. Students must also deal with this kind of ambiguity, just as the consultant does. Student team consulting places you in real-world situations where they address the real-world needs of their clients (Greiner & Metzger, 1983).

Consulting is all about problem-solving. In the initial stages of a consulting engagement, underlying causes of the client’s problem are often unknown. The consultant must search the evidence, read the clues, and define the problems.

Types of consultants

There are several basic types of consultants, and we will focus on two: process and content, and the approaches (diagnostic and implementation) that can be used with these two. As noted by Porth and Saltis (1998),

Process consultants encourage their clients to identify their own problems and formulate their own solutions through a series of questions and guidance…. A content consultant is more like a surgeon, in that they take a direct approach to diagnose the problem and develop a corrective action…. The consultant performs all phases of the process, and presents a preferred solution to the client…. A diagnostic approach identifies the causes of problems and recommends a course of action to solve the problem. However, this process stops short at this point and does not see the recommended changes through to fruition. The implementation approach includes the actual execution of the proposed changes.

(p. 29)

Student team consulting is typically done using a content approach rather than a process approach, as students do not act as a counselor to the client as is done in the process approach. A student team usually researches the problem and presents a solution to the client. The solution presented is then considered diagnostic because it would stop short of implementation. As students operate under an academic calendar, and must wrap up projects fairly quickly, they typically do not see the “rest of the story” and do not implement their recommendations to the client. In contrast, small business consultants in non-academic settings may implement their recommended changes as part of their contract with the client.

Experiential learning

Experiential learning is a broad category that encompasses a range of learning activities from internships to consulting projects to student-run ventures. It is considered more holistic than classroom-only instruction and helps bridge the gap between what the students learn passively and the actual job expectations that students encounter when they enter the working world (Maskulka, Stout, & Massad, 2011).

This text is about experiential learning using student team consulting to gain knowledge, and then demonstrating how the consulting process enhances student learning. As stated by Kickul, Griffiths, and Bacq (2010), to gain genuine knowledge from an experience, certain abilities are required:

• - the learner must be willing to be actively involved in the experience;
• - the learner must possess and use analytical skills to conceptualize the experience;
• - the learner must possess decision-making and problem-solving skills to use the new ideas gained from the experience; and,
• - the learner must be able to reflect on the experience (p. 654).

Specifically, the methodology used in experiential student team consulting is called problem-based learning (PBL; Brownell & Jameson, 2004). What better way to prepare you for the “real world” than to engage in a consulting process? As noted by Peterson (2004), when discussing PBL:

in the workplace, problems are ill structured, ambiguous, messy, complex, and most often do not have one correct answer that can be found at the end of the book in the answer key…. These types of problems provide a powerful learning opportunity…. This new learning paradigm also makes the learning process messy…. No longer is the path to success clear. This paradigm requires that the students first identify what the real problem is, next identify what they know and need to know, and then identify viable solutions through both creative and critical thinking.

(p. 632)

Furthermore, in consulting projects, students often discover that the client’s business decisions are not always made on a rational basis and, instead, find an emotional justification. As a result, PBL projects also offer the possibility of “eureka” moments, where students learn about less-than-ideal business decision-making (Brownell & Jameson, 2004). Part of the reason consulting has a certain level of ambiguity is that the client may rely on “gut instincts” to make decisions (another way to characterize emotional justifications), and there can be information gaps due to incomplete or inaccurate reporting. The client will likely be reporting in good faith, but part of the problem can be these errors. This is a common problem in management, and consulting gives a good introduction to this issue. A crucial part of the consulting process is learning how to manage ambiguity.

In conducting fieldwork, students will operate under this type of uncertainty. Since fieldwork involves a client and a real-life experience, the situation will likely be fluid and information may change over the course of the consulting assignment. Therefore, as noted in the above explanation of PBL, fieldwork requires an integrated, holistic approach that examines the issues from different business perspectives, as well as from different functional disciplines. Students will learn that there can be multiple solutions and discern when to change your mindset from one of inquiry, i.e., questioning the pros and cons of multiple approaches, to one of advocacy, i.e., picking one approach from the range of alternatives and then making a strong case for that choice. PBL methodology allows you to research unstructured, complex problems. These types of problems require you to define the issues, develop alternative solutions, and pick an option (Brownell & Jameson, 2004).

The student team consulting model shares some similarities with service-learning pedagogy, as both

seek to balance academic rigor with a practical relevance which furnishes students with a broader and, we argue, richer, educational experience. They address one of the most salient criticisms of business education today – the absence of realistic experience, applied learning, and grounded personal development.

(Godfrey, Illes, & Berry, 2005, p. 311)

Fieldwork is thus an excellent mechanism to improve research abilities and critical thinking skills. As Brownell and Jamison (2004) state:

Fieldwork provides an interdisciplinary catalyst to motivate students’ cognitive and affective learning but also as an impetus for skills-oriented learning by providing team tasks that interweave challenges from several disciplines. A well-chosen problem yields a group of team tasks that requires integrated learning rather than fragmented learning. An interdisciplinary approach is realistic because business problems usually cut across typical curricular boundaries. Thus, PBL encourages students to develop implementation skills that mirror those required to meet future challenges that they will face.

(p. 561)

Hence, students will be challenged to not only discover information about a particular issue but, in many cases, determine if this issue is important at all. From an anonymous course evaluation, one student consultant noted:

Unlike a regular course where we are told to read chapter 6 and answer questions 1–5, the consulting experience required us to consider whether chapter 6 even mattered and if so, which questions were important. More than anything else, we learned to ask good questions.

Because of this inherent need to ask good questions, students’ research included synthesizing materials from a wide variety of sources. Through the learning techniques utilized in the consulting process, students learned how to imply important business concepts, how companies functioned, and how methods of inquiry help clarify complex business situations (Brownell & Jameson, 2004).

The educational process is much more than memorizing a set of facts and figures. It is about lifelong learning and equipping the student with the skills to handle ambiguous situations. Fieldwork does just that.

Fieldwork projects can vary based on the time and complexity of the consulting assignment and whether these projects are part of other classes or are a separate course. Regardless of their structure, all projects typically involve a client, instructor, and students. The interplay of these groups constitutes the framework for learning.

Conceptual framework

The experiential student team consulting model has four constituencies: the client, the student team, the student, and the instructor, as depicted in Figure 1.1. This model represents all the players in an experiential student team consulting environment.

Figure 1.1 Experiential student team consulting model.

The client (C) represents the firm/organization who will be the beneficiary of the consulting engagement. Depending on the size of the firm, the client can be more than one person (or single point of contact), but, under most consulting assignments, there is usually one client-point person. The client typically works initially with the instructor setting up the project parameters, then with the team during the semester, and finally with the team and the instructor to wrap up the engagement, often at the final presentation.

The circle S represents the student consultant as an individual involved in the consulting process. The student works within the team (T). The team interacts with the client, the instructor, and among its individual members. In viewing the model, the individual student (S) and the client never interact because this is a student team consulting process. Under this consulting framework, the team is considered the consulting professional, and the viewpoints expressed to the client by the team’s contact person (the team leader) represents the team’s position and are not necessarily the opinion of any individual student.

The instructor (I) has the opening role in the process as they coordinate with the client initially and often set up the student team. There is usually an initial meeting for the class where all students meet to discuss the syllabus and course rules. If the consulting project is part of a class (not a separate course), the rest of the class will meet in its normal fashion during the semester. For separate consulting courses, the instructor facilitates the team during the consulting engagement, interacts with each student individually, and concludes the consulting course. Student interactions with the instructor begin when the consulting assignments are being structured, during any points in the engagement where individual grading occurs, and if problems arise. The time constraints of the academic calendar will help determine how proactive the instructor needs to be regarding problem-solving regarding client or team issues.

The next focus is on the model’s multiple interactions, which provide an understanding of how the consulting process works. There are seven interactions, represented by overlapping circles in the model. The team and the instructor have a greater role, as measured by the number of possible interactions, at five each. The client and the student each have three interaction possibilities. It is important to note that while the interactions discussed below are described as occurring face-to-face, recent events (the pandemic) required most schools to switch to a period of remote learning. The authors experienced that pivot as well, and used remote synchronous in place of face-to-face meetings. Hence, the processes described below can...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• About the authors
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Experiential learning using consulting
• 2 Developing the consulting team and its dynamics
• 3 Identifying the client's issues through root cause analysis
• 4 Client contract development and relationship management
• 5 Project deliverables
• 6 Professional development and conclusion
• Appendix 1: Templates
• Appendix 2: Examples
• References
• Index