General Information
Instructor(s)
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Target Audience
This course provides the foundation and pre-requisite insights for the project courses in Management Consulting, such as the experiential course “Management Consulting in Uncertainty”. It is primarily targeted at students at the end of their first year MBA or part-time students in their second/third year, who wish to understand specific consulting tools, how to manage client projects and/or plan a consulting career. The learnings from this course are broadly applicable across business functions and industries, and are therefore not only relevant to consulting, but also valuable in corporate strategy assignments or business development challenges.
Format
Intensive format – please see the elective course list on the Registrar’s Office website for the exact schedule.
Course Mission
Strategy consultants help organizations analyze and solve some of their most challenging business problems. These problems are typically ill-defined and cross-functional, with clients frequently holding conflicting views on the situation.
This course will help students to develop structured problem-solving, and work on their communication, team and influencing skills that will help to bring clarity and structure to the business problem and identify appropriate solutions.
Course Scope
The emphasis in this course is on developing problem-solving skills, with additional focus given to communication and influencing skills. It will be organized around the phases of a typical consulting engagement: problem definition, problem structuring, data gathering and analysis, recommendations development and presentation. Students will learn and practice specific consulting tools and principles associated with each of these five phases, such as issue trees, hypothesis-driven problem solving, client communication and team management.
This skills-development course emphasizes hands-on practice and will involve a combination of mini-cases, assignments, and lectures. Guest speakers from the consulting industry will help to round out the consulting picture. While this course does not include project work, there is the opportunity to apply the learning in the immediately following experiential course “Management Consulting in Uncertainty”, offered in conjunction with Deloitte.
Evaluation and Grade Breakdown
| Component | Due | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| Various Group Assignments | In-class | 40% |
| Final Paper | 2 weeks after the course | 60% |
Required Resources
There is no textbook. The course package will contain cases and articles and will be available for purchase prior to the course. Other reading material will be handed out during the classroom sessions.
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