The Consultancy Challenge
Students describe how they were prepared for the Consultancy Challenge and talk about some of the consulting tools they used on their projects.
Watch more Consultancy Challenge videos.
Module leader: Professor David Pettifer
Duration and timing: conducted over 4 weeks, Spring Term
Overview
The Consultancy Challenge is the second of the consulting interventions on the Lancaster MBA. Building on your experience of the first term’s New Venture Challenge, it is designed to increase your effectiveness in leading in a team and working in a consultancy context.
The module aims to help you understand leadership as a relational process of influence, orientated towards exploring opportunities, solving problems and implementing action. As you come to understand each of these processes better at a theoretical level and then go through them for real, you develop your ability and confidence in leading teams through complex problems.
Deepak Rai and Sun Kim completed their strategic Consultancy Challenge with one of the world's largest banks: HSBC.
Watch more Consultancy Challenge videos.
In the first part of the module you are introduced to a 'consultancy tool-kit': a set of tools and skills that will enable you to address complexity and deliver purposeful outcomes. The main topic focus is on leadership as a process of influencing, on soft systems methodology, and on additional approaches such as cognitive mapping and theory of constraints. You also look at the principles of effective consultancy, the barriers to successful intervention and how consultants manage risk.
After exploring these various thinking approaches, you then apply them: first to a series of case studies, then to a second piece of live consultancy work, the 'Consultancy Challenge'.
The Challenge involves working in groups to analyse a problem situation for a client organisation. These client organisations are typically medium-sized companies in the North West, looking to address particular issues in HR, marketing, strategy or operational areas. Your brief is to develop recommendations as how the situation can be managed, culminating in a presentation to the client and Lancaster staff.
Assessment
Group-based presentation, consultancy report and peer evaluation
Related links
MBA students stay on right side of the law with Police Sport UK
On their Consultancy Challenge in 2007, a group of Lancaster MBA students worked with the UK Police's sporting arm, advising Police Sport UK on business development.
