Совсем недавно я начала преподавать в Высшей Школе Экономики. Я веду курс International Business Consulting у одной группы первого курса программы Master of International Business (MIB) факультета МЭиМП.
Как приятно вернуться в стены альма-матер, но уже в новой роли (я тоже выпускник MIB)! Всем очень рекомендую испытать радостный опыт преподавания, когда ты думаешь, что вечером после работы уже не способен ни на что, а потом студенты заряжают тебя таким количеством энергии, что, кажется, готов просидеть с ними хоть до утра.
Немного расскажу о сути курса. Группа поделена на команды по 4-5 человек. У каждой группы есть свой консалтинговый проект, который они должны закончить за 3 месяца. Проекты очень разнообразны: это и supply chain, и market research и количественный анализ портфеля продуктов, и customer journey design и еще много всего. Среди клиентов Henkel, Pepsi, Unilever и еще много замечательных, доверившихся нам компаний со своими разнообразными проблемами, которые им помогают решить наши студенты.
Моя роль в ходе курса - это наставничество и проектный контроль. Каждую неделю ко мне приходят команды и рассказывают о ходе проекта. Исходя из своих теоретических и практических знаний, я делаю все возможное, чтобы оценить их работу, указать на зоны развития и порекомендовать дополнительные шаги для усиления их работы.
Я со студентами уже два месяца, и заметила, что у многих из них одни и те же сложности или ошибки. Это натолкнуло меня на мысль делать подборки хороших консалтинговых практик, инструментов и подходов, которые будет полезно использовать как начинающим консультантам, так и любым профессионалам, которые сталкиваются с проектными задачами в своей компании или в собственном бизнесе.
В этом выпуске делюсь своим первым письмом для студентов. Сохраняю его на английском языке, поскольку преподавание у нас ведется на английском.
Надеюсь, в будущем переложу свои заметки в формат русскоязычной книги, а пока что пусть все остается таким, каким рождается в ходе курса.
1. Minutes of the meeting
It is always useful to understand what has been discussed at the meeting (documents, topics, other materials), who has attended and what the client and the project team has agreed upon.
If you don't document the key takeaways from the meeting there can always be a risk of misunderstanding. Additionally, you are missing a great tool for managing client's expectations. If it hasn't been put on paper, it simply didn't happen! Thus, the client can request anything at the next meeting and you won't have any evidence that you were not supposed to prepare it for the meeting. It is especially important in cases of having difficult clients with controversial expectations.
Make sure you help your client and yourself to be on the same page and understand the following things:
- Who was present
- When the meeting happened
- Reference number of the meeting (if applicable)
- What deliverables you have brought to the meeting
- Agenda of the meeting
- Key action points
- Decisions made by the participants
- To-Dos for the next meeting
There is no strictly confirmed format that you need to use. On the contrary, you are free to choose the template that fits best your purposes.
Further reading:
2. Presentation storyline
The purpose of your presentation is to communicate your ideas to the client effectively.
You might have done an immense amount of work, nonetheless there is no need to share everything. There should be just enough information in order to convey key ideas, assumptions and further recommendations making sure that each point in the presentation is supported by quantitative or qualitative data or clear reference to it (I will cover data part further in my newsletters).
Moreover, ideally your presentation should be entertaining (to some extent) and engaging to draw attention of the client.
However, how is it possible to turn boring data into an interesting story? Quite simple.
There are several steps how you can design a logical story behind your slides.
Firstly, start with the key issues. Probably, you have already completed SCQ analysis for your business case. Now it is time to use it. However, it is worth to refresh the list because as the two month have passed, you might have identified additional problems. This list should be strictly relevant to your client. Event though consultants are highly valued for thinking out of the box, you should still focus on the client concerns. How to understand what's the most important and critical for your counterpart? It's easy - try to understand their KPIs as well as expectations from the project. It might be straightforward like improving sales of a specific segment or solving a market research enigma. Alternatively, concerns might be quite personal like wishing to get a promotion or force allocating a budget for the new project. If you focus on the concerns that are irrelevant to your client, you will waste everyone's time.
After having updated the issue list, you can start mapping client concerns to the relevant assumptions or ideas on how to solve the issue. Both assumptions as well as suggestions for the situation improvement should be supported by strong arguments that are difficult to challenge. Concerns should turn into the headings that describe current situation. Sometimes you might not need such slides depending on the essence and purpose of your presentation. Assumptions and ideas will turn into heading where you either explain why things go wrong or give concrete recommendations on how to improve the situation. Remember, that the heading should be concise, yet descriptive. Thus, the structure of your presentation will look like this:
Concern n1 => Heading: Things go wrong (general conclusions)
- Assumption 1 => Heading: Why we think things go wrong
- Assumption 2 => Heading: What needs to be done to fix things
Concern n1 => Heading: Things go wrong (general conclusions)
- Assumption 1 => Heading: Why we think things go wrong
- Assumption 2 => Heading: What needs to be done to fix things
Wrap-up: summary of the key assumptions => Heading: What needs to be done overall in order to fix things
- ... Here can be titles with calls to action
Finally, make sure, if the logical structure allows you to, you keep the presentation dynamic by comparing two situations ("as is" to "to be" or "+" to "-" ). Such approach is well demonstrated on the illustration from HBR article below.
3. Presentation hygiene
When making slides, you need to make sure you do simple things to make it look professional:
Fonts
- There shouldn't be more than two different fonts in the presentation. One is used for headings and text, another - for graphs, footers and other small elements
- You should pick not more than three font sizes for your presentation. One is for headers, second - for the body of the slide and third - for graphs, footers and other small elements
- When choosing fonts, remember that it is easier to read sans serif on slides than serif
Color
- When choosing color scheme, there should be limited amount of colors (ideally, not more than three)
- Information management
- Make sure that all graphs and images have names and references to credible source. If you refer to your own research, you need to have a back-up slide with synopsis of your research
- Check that each phrase that needs explanation have a reference to the footnote
- Each slide needs to have a page number and reference to the date when the presentation was demonstrated to the client
Tabulation
- Check that there is clear logic for alignment that is consistent for each slide
Punctuation
- It is not necessary to put dots in the header unless you have two sentences. In such case, you need only one dot between the sentences
- It is not necessary to put semicolons or commas in the list with bullet points or numbers
- Often, dots are not necessary if there is text in the box explaining something on the slide
Title page
- Title page should have reference to the date when the presentation is demonstrated to the client