Source of the activity:
My own class teaching BUSN 6070 Project Management & Consulting

Brief description of the activity:
Consulting is a challenging activity. One of the most important parts of consulting is ensuring you are solving the right problem. Many clients know that they have an opportunity for improvement and often believe that they know what will solve the problem. However, it is the job of the consultant to make recommendations that will really solve an issue, not just recommend what the client wants. How does this happen? Through asking good questions. Students will be given a one page case where the protagonist is looking for help, and the students must provide a list of questions that they believe will help them get information to solve her problem.

How this activity will fit with my teaching practice:
I believe that students learn best by doing and this activity encourages that. The biggest challenges that students often face when working on business problem solving is “jumping to solution” which means they given an answer without actually thinking about analyzing the problem. In the case of consulting, this requires communication, insightful questioning, and trying to gain as broad an understanding of the situation as possible. Since I am not engaged in online course development it will be difficult to actually create and do one of these exercises in my online courses. I believe that I would like to offer it as a non-credit opportunity for students to do if they choose to, a sort of enrichment activity. I believe it is important to give students opportunities to connect with how firms actually work and hire in addition to the course topics and work that they do.

Helpful resources or links:

Flawless Consulting (Book by Block)

Specific ‘next steps’ for how I intend to use this activity:
First I need to create a one page instruction sheet in addition to the case that I can post for students to use. I believe I would like to try to use Moodle functions to get students to submit their questions which I can group together before we discuss what they thought. Then we can discuss what they were hoping to gain through the questions and we can decide if they would get enough information to move forward with the consulting engagement. It will be useful to try to have a “discussion” of some sort occur between me and the students. I also need to facilitate group making or at least pairing up to enable online students to participate.