During the second phase of our training program, we added a new course called
Client Consultancy Practicum. It was conducted by Andrew Allen who is a three-children father. Andrew came from Utah State and used to work for KPMG. After traveling a few countries, he gave up working as an employee and started his own business as an consultant. He determines to change the education in US, tries to connect real world business to university, and gets the students to learn practical education.
The first class he impressed most of the trainees, not only because he made very well small talk before class and got accountant with everyone, but also because his teaching methodology. Learning by doing.
The main learning objectives of this course contains 3 parts.
First is managing a client. During this process, the most urgent thing is building a relationship with client. When looking back, I found everything worked perfect timing. After each team was assigned a client, an organization called iVenture sponsored an social networking event in a bar located in Urbana. This provided us a chance to meet the young entrepreneurs of UIUC without even sending an E-mail at advance! Good part of a social networking event. When people were eating and drinking, they tended to low their protective sensitivity and were easy to communicate, simply because they were satisfied with the foods, I guess. Another skill we learnt through the class is managing expectation and then getting buy-in and selling your solutions.
The second goal is working in a team. Andrew divided us into small groups and asked each group to build a 50 cm tower by using marshmallow and noodles. Through this little game, he tried to teach us the importance of team leadership, the unique strengths of individual members and contribution of each person and how to collaborate with others. We soon found that saying is easier than doing. We need to deliver our solution to our real-world client, Menu3. As a result, we had a few brain storm discussions. It was not always easy to find the proper time that suit everyone. And the distribution of the work is difficult to balance. The evaluation of each member’s contribution to the project could not be precisely measured. One key to these problems is making a team charter.
Last but not the least, solving a problem. This is the ultimate reason of why the team exist and how value is created. To provide the proper solution to client, the consultants need to understand how the organization work and gathering related information. The second procedure is defining the problem and scoping. This part is crucial because the client hired you to help them find where the problem is and how to solve it. The process of learn, frame, collect, understand and synthesize could repeat itself for several times. When finishing detecting and define the problem, it follows planning and doing the work and providing solution. However, this process took a lot of time on research, discussion and presentation with client.
Specifically, we brought our client into a group chat, so that we could discussed with each other very easily. After several meeting with the clients, we figured out what they want to achieve and presented our issue tree, business model canvas and engagement letter.
This course helped the trainees had a better understanding the real word case and learnt to do work both internally and externally.