Course Description
The MBA Consulting Practicum is a 4-credit course for 2nd year FT MBA students.
At the core, consulting is about problem-solving for clients. Whether you intend to work as a consultant for outside clients or to provide the best services within your own company as an internal consultant, the frameworks, tools, and techniques you learn in this class will set you up for success. This course is led by Nicole M. Coomber, PhD, a lecturer in management and organization who has taught consulting classes for the past eight years, and Albert Krall of Deloitte Consulting, who has 25 years of experience in Deloitte, Accenture, and smaller consulting firms.
Students who join this class will become junior consultants working for Coomber and Krall as managing partners. Coomber and Krall will engage a client and brief students on methods of consulting, background on the client, and problem-solving. The class will start with a three week consulting boot camp, where students will learn about consulting frameworks; problem solving methods; research and analysis methods; and presentation and storytelling methods. Throughout, the emphasis will be on teaching student consultants how to deliver value for the client.
After the initial boot camp in consulting practices, student consultants will work in teams of four or five on a project designed and scoped by Coomber and Krall. Student consultant teams will deliver four updates to their managing partners and their clients, culminating in a final deliverable to the client. The deliverables will consist of a kick-off deck; initial research findings; initial recommendations; and final recommendations.
The topic of the project will be determined by Coomber and Krall based on initial interviews with students, and student consultants will be assigned to teams based on the initial interviews. All teams will work on different aspects of a project with one client.
Upon completion of the MBA Consulting Practicum course, students will gain a wide range of skills in a "living case" environment by:
- Understand the management consulting industry and the application of consulting skills in all business settings
- Explain how a structured consulting process can be used to analyze business problems, define approaches, design solutions and present understanding
- Listen to, interpret, iterate, and define a client’s challenge within a consulting process
- Understand how to gather and analyze research, both primary and secondary, that furthers understanding of a client’s challenge
- Formulate a hypothesis for solving a client’s challenge based on prior knowledge, information gathering, and research
- Create and evaluate possible solutions to a client’s problem, defined by specific criteria
- Communicate ideas effectively in diverse professional settings
- Synthesize the lessons of a client project and evaluate the performance of the team and the individual on delivering the results