If you are joining a b-school this year, chances are that it would have its own set of student-run and faculty-guided subject clubs such as the Marketing Club, Finance Club, Consulting Club and more. Guest Writer and Founder of consulting services and training firm ZENeSYS Saibal Sen provides tips to make the best of being a member of the Consulting Club.

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One of the biggest attractions for joining a Consulting Club at a b-school is the opportunity to work on live projects. Since consulting is 20% theory and 80% practice, hands-on engagement is the only way to learn the nuances of consulting.

However, in some cases, even brand-name b-school consulting clubs end up getting very few live projects leaving members frustrated. Here are seven tips you can use to improve your chances of bagging live projects and keep the pipeline flowing to ensure all members can get a fair chance to participate in live projects.

One Define your product

Before you decide to design a logo, print your brochure and put up your website, take stock of your member capabilities, faculty, resources and location.

Try to figure out the best possible value proposition for your potential clients. A good value proposition to your client means that you are offering something that others cannot match.

For a Consulting Club in a Bangalore based b-school to sell Cloud Computing strategy is a difficult sell. There are too many commercial consulting firms who can compete on price and value. If this b-school has a strong HR faculty and a curriculum, they might offer strategies in attrition management. Your ability to conduct primary surveys and strong HR intellectual capital will help convince the client that you can provide better value for money than anyone else.

Avoid the trap of chasing the most ‘in-thing’ in industry. While you may think that it will be good to put ‘Cloud Computing Consulting’ on your resume, the reality is that the skills you learn from a live consulting engagement is irrelevant to the sector or technology.

Two Define roles and responsibilities

Gear up like a professional services firm. Figure out who might be good at selling, who might be good at delivering and who might be good at project management. Sellers are Type A personalities who can generate trust and build relationships. Delivery folks are deeply analytical and are fond of facts and figures. The project managers are good at communicating and like to keep things orderly.

At any time, all roles are active in an engagement. The sales role does not end when you win the engagement, they are still needed to keep the scope of work under control and communicate with the client. Towards the end they must try to up-sell more projects. The project manager is responsible for communications and managing risk, which is also a continuous process.

When you create your proposal and project plan, make sure these roles are clearly defined, the tasks identified, hours are properly estimated and the job is priced accordingly.

Three Make a resource plan

Careful planning must be done to work around your academic, social and personal commitments. Once the roles are defined, the club should create a resource plan for the entire term year. This will give you an idea on when is a best time for working on projects. Some months will be better than others for delivering projects. If this is known ahead of time, your sales efforts can be planned accordingly.

Allow 20% for project overruns and make sure there is a back up for each role in time critical projects. If you are new to consulting, I recommend up to 50% error in effort estimation. It’s better to sink in more time than compromise your clients trust.

Ensure that members are well prepared for consulting. Some good books on consulting are ‘The McKinsey Way’ and ‘The Professional Advisor’ ‘The Trusted Advisor’. The ability and the need to conduct deep research and analysis are critical in any consulting engagement.

A simulation of an internal consulting project might be a good way to get your consulting team mobilized and well oiled. A friendly client project will be an even better option.

Make sure you have someone who has prior consulting experience to lead the project.

Four Create a marketing plan

Dont make the mistake of relying on your b-school brand name, fancy press releases and outbound email marketing campaigns. If business comes from these channels, well and good. If you want to be prepared for real life then learn some hard-core selling, reach out to prospects through your own network.

Dont be shy to press for leads from faculty, alumni, student or their family connections and investors/partners of your b-school. Also be sure to connect with last years consulting club committee members for names and phone numbers of past clients.

Prepare a list of prospects based on your consulting product defined earlier. Have the junior students compile names and addresses from websites and any other source you can lay your hands on for creating a good list. Call them, send your brochure and setup meetings.

Remember you only have a few minutes to engage a prospect. So your pitch should be well prepared, practiced and timed. Be clear on what you are offering, how it will help the client and how exactly you will be doing the work.

For sure, your client will raise the question of confidentiality. This is a big concern in consulting projects. Take a sample copy of your confidentiality agreement you have made all members sign when they joined the club.

One example of a standard confidentiality agreement can be seen here on http://www.ipwatchdog.com/tradesecret/standard-confidentiality-agreement/

Five Manage actively

A common situation for failure is when the client agrees on the scope of work and consultants assume that no communication is necessary till the job is done.

Painful as it sounds, please break up the deliverables into small chunks and get it to the client for reviews at regular intervals.

This will prevent misunderstandings, avoid scope creep, and you will have a very involved (therefore satisfied) client.

A standard format of weekly project review is to state the objectives of the meeting, check if the work allocated in the past week was done, if not done what was the reason and how it can be rectified. Next review the tasks for next week and ask the team members if there is any reason it cannot be accomplished. If not, what is the issue and how it can be resolved.

Keep meeting minutes and progress updates online in one of the many collaboration services that are available on the Internet such as Google Docs, Ning, ZOHO, FMYI or Huddle.

Six Maintain quality

Define some quality standards up-front. This allows measurement of success. There should be quality standards for the client and there should be another set of standards for your internal project operations.

For client, you need to define success criteria such as the yardstick for on-time and on-budget completion. You should definitely set a watermark for client feedback minimum ratings you want to accomplish.

For your internal club standards, you may want to set goals on number of projects you want to win, number of student consulting hours you will generate, accuracy of your resource planning, revenue generation targets, tracking placements on the basis of consulting experience etc.

All this is important because you need to measure success in some tangible manner. Only then you will know the degree of success and more importantly, you can figure out where improvement is needed.

Seven Create a legacy

For those of you who are lucky, the former batch will hand over some systems and processes to get you going.

Those of you, who are starting a new club, please think how you can help the next batch in getting a head start.

Things that an existing club committee can pass down to the next can be client & prospect list, a database of past projects, templates, brochures, logos, banners and vendor/partner relationships.

Some tips to perpetuate such capabilities are to build in rewards/recognition for proper documentation of projects in your quality standards. There are several online collaboration platforms such as Google Docs, Ning, Huddle, etc.

Figure out some creative ways to bring back outgoing consulting club members to return as mentors and potential source of consulting leads.

First year students can work as consultants and second year students can work as client engagement partners (sales) and project managers.

In summary

Consulting Clubs are a great way for b-school students to learn about consulting. Without the opportunity of working on a live project, consulting clubs will lose meaning for the members. To attract live projects, a consulting club needs to organize itself as an efficient marketing and delivery organization.

About the author: Saibal Sen is the founder of ZENeSYS, a professional services consulting and training organization. Saibal was formerly a management consultant at Arthur D Little. He has a Masters in Management Sciences from The London School of Economics. He can be reached at [email protected]