Consulting projects – case studies
What kind of projects are MA Human Resources and Consulting students asked to undertake? And what do they learn from the experience? Each year the answers to those questions will be different, but here are two recent examples which give a flavour of what is involved.
Circle Leasing
The Circle Leasing team planning their presentation.
Circle Leasing is a market-leading car leasing company which is based in Bury and supplies courtesy cars to body shops across the UK. A fast-growing entrepreneurial company which was established around ten years ago, Circle was now keen to bring in-house its HR services which had previously been outsourced.
As a first step towards that, the team of seven MA students were tasked with conducting a company-wide HR needs analysis and audit, looking at issues such as job and role profiles, appraisal systems and progression within the company. The team was also asked to make suggestions for improving employee engagement, empowerment and collaborative learning.
‘They wanted someone to come in and take a critical look, both to benchmark where they are now and to see what they could do next,’ said Laura Stamford from Canada, one of the team assigned to the project.
The students interviewed key employees at various levels within the organisation, and conducted a survey across all of the company’s 23 employees.
For all the team members, this was an unfamiliar sector so the pressure was on to assimilate new information very rapidly.
‘At first we knew nothing about this industry, but meeting with the client quickly gave us a better understanding of how the business works and what the key issues were,’ said Noon Makduangkaew from Thailand.
‘We had to work out just how far we could go into detail, bearing in mind the time-frame we had to work with,’ added Julia Neumann, who, like Noon, had already worked for several years as a consultant before joining the programme.
‘Our tutor was our sounding board for the ideas we developed. I gained a lot from the project. Because we were from different backgrounds, it was really interesting to see different perspectives on the same issue.’
Members of the Yorkshire Bank team with their clients after the presentation.
Yorkshire Bank
For the Yorkshire Bank, one of the critical business challenges is to ensure that it maintains a high level of employee engagement across all of its operations and enables its staff to perform to maximum capability. To this end, the Bank has established a People Development Partner in each of its four regions, whose remit is to take forward a professional and leadership development, training, coaching, mentoring and talent development schemes.
Commissioning a consulting project from the MA in HR and Consulting programme enabled the Bank to take a new look at how best to utilise their People Development Partners. This tied in with a wider strategic review of learning and training provision being undertaken by the Bank. The students were asked to analyse best practice across other organisations, particularly within the financial sector, and to identify which structures and methodologies could be particularly beneficial.
For its internal research, the team concentrated on one division of the Bank, its Integrated Financial Services, and conducted both quantitative and qualitative research with staff at all levels.
‘They wanted us to assess the current state of learning and development right across the IFS division because they are looking to build a route for talent management and ensure succession,’ explained Amré Basama, one of the student team.
‘The project provided a great way to hone and refine my management knowledge,’ he added. ‘We learnt a lot about consulting both as a process and as a discipline.’
For Preman Chandran from Singapore, the project also offered a valuable way of extending his previous experience within a family business. ‘Because I came from a small company, I hadn’t had a lot of opportunity to work in teams with people from different backgrounds, so that’s been very useful. As part of the process we had to look at learning processes within different companies, so that gave us a great chance to network as well.’
