- Team: Each team has 5-7 consultants, one senior consultant, one project manager, and one senior manager
- Engagement: Each engagement lasts 12-14 weeks and are confined by the terms of the semester
- Organization: The organization is IBC and is representetd by leadership who are three directors that are hired by the College of Business
- Client: Your client is who hired IBC to put together a team for your project and they are usually one of the main stakeholders in the project
- Cycle: There are midpoint (6-7 weeks) and final (12-14 weeks) presentations that are the equivalent of a "busy season" in consulting
There are good projects and bad projects, good clients and bad clients, and good team members and bad team members on each project. However, the principal of working for a service firm introduces many important points, but the most being responsibility. Those who work for service firms as an employee are employed both by the firm as well as the client which can sometimes result in a struggle over whose direction should be taken.
As the Internal Manager, I oversee projects and work with some of the Senior Managers on over-seeing how their projects are going from a peer perspective. A few weeks ago I sat down with a Senior Manager who was having difficulty with the exact issue- whose input should she be taking into consideration. Following her internal midpoint presentation, which is when the IBC directors review the deliverable before taking it to the client, the directors said that she was behind in her project and they ultimately demmed the project a failure. This is because she was staffed on a highly technical project and they felt that she had put far too much time into having her team develop the survey as opposed to moving on to the analysis and formulating recommendations. However, this is exactly what the client had wanted : heavy focus on the survey.
As a Senior Manager, she is paid by IBC, however IBC is paid by her client who is working on an energy and utilities project. She didn't quite understand who she was responsible to:
- Directors: The directors thought she needed to move on and send the survey out as is, collect and analyze the results, then formulate a recommendation for a client
- Client: The client wanted a really well developed survey that they would send out for results
In this situation, there really was no way for her to compromise and serve both. She needed to choose one agent to be responsible to and figure out a justification for the other. In this case, she decided to serve the clients need since ultimately they are the highest form of authority as they employ the organization that employs her and her team. She continued to develop the survey with the client much to the dismay of the directors who considered her project to be a failure.
In triangle principle models like this, there was no way to compromise and be responsible to both. They had to choose one or the other in the end. This is because the distribution of power and responsibility is not even. If the directors and the client had had even stakes then they would have had a harder struggle determining who to be responsible. An example of this may have been if they had two different stakeholders at the client site who wanted different things.
The decision made by the Senior Manager was not necessarily a failure just because they chose only one agent to satisfy. She made a decision to maximize the chance of success with the client which is a judgement call the must be made in the business world. If she had chosen to have taken the directors side and not follow the clients request she might have lost follow up work with the client in the future and damaged that relationship, which demonstrates long term strategy in maintaining the Triangle Principal Agent Model since she was able to justify to the directors why she made the decision she did.
You seem to have captured the triangle part reasonably well. But your description about IBC itself could have been much clearer. Let me try to illustrate that.
ReplyDeleteYou begin saying that IBC is the largest student run consulting organization, but you don't say anything about the comparison group. Largest on campus, in the state of Illinois, in the nation? I assume being large is an object of pride, but I don't know why that should be so.
Then you talk about project teams and list some of the team members - senior consultant, senior manager, and project manager. But you don't describe their roles nor do you indicate whether the team is flat in its org structure or if there is some hierarchy. Later in the piece it sounded like the senior manager was the boss of the team. If that is right, it would have been good to say that up front.
Then you talk about the IBC Directors. Are they also students? Or are they full time staff. In either case, you didn't describe their agenda/preferences/goals at all. So while it was clear that a triangle did emerge here, it was far from clear why it happened.
In some cases the triangle can be managed by side conversations with one of the principals to explain what's going on and to see if the principal will compromise to make the overall more in alignment. Because you didn't really flesh out the motives of the of the players it is impossible to tell here whether that would have been possible.
In sum, you described the outcomes reasonably well, but the cause for the outcomes not well at all. In our class, we're trying to get at the causality.
You bring up good points about the project structure. Let me attempt to clarify. Illinois Business Consulting is structured by being overseen by three directors who are College of Business faculty. These adults are mostly responsible for the business development and financials of the organization. They are the main drivers of the experience, making sure that the vision of the organization is then executed by the student leaders. There is also a Student Director who is a fourth year PhD student in Chemistry who acts as a liason between the two programs.
DeleteAs for the actually business structure, it is built in a hierarchy structure with the Senior Leadership team underneath them. This is made up of 12 senior managers. Each senior manager oversees three project managers who have a team of 5-7 consultants and one senior consultant underneath them. The senior consultant is a mix of consultant and project manager responsibilities to continue to develop those who soon may up for promotion.
Illinois Business Consulting is the largest student run consulting organization in the united state. It is just meant to quantify the magnitude of the organization since there are approximetly 300 students employed at any time within the organization.