Effective Team Structures


I have been a part of various organizations on campus; however, I feel like I have been a part of a very successful team on Illinois Business Consulting. This organization is part of Geis College of Business, and it is student-run but has a couple faculty members that oversee it. The organization has over two-hundred undergraduate and graduate students in it. There are about twenty-five projects a semester with different teams of students assigned to them. The purpose for Illinois Business Consulting is to have students offer consulting solutions to various organizations around campus or large-scale companies internationally. This provides companies with a cheaper consulting solution, and it gives students real world consulting experience.

I was able to work with a large-scale insurance company based out of New York City. The company wanted to implement a start-up data analytics tool for their human resources department. This tool was needed to help the company seek and maintain talent, and it was also needed to track employee productivity. This would help the company identify strengths and employees deserving of promotions, which could help increase employee retention. My team researched various start-up incubators and the products they offered. In addition, we conducted primary research by administering numerous cold calls and surveys within the company and to our client’s competitors. This helped us gather data about employee retention rates, and our client was able to present this data to the superiors within the company. When our clients did this, they were able to receive approval in their budget for the new Human Resources data analytics tool. After a semester of research, my team went to New York City to present our recommendations and budget analysis for the company. Our client was very thrilled by our work, and they ended up asking Illinois Business Consulting to come back for another project the upcoming semester.

My team and the overall organization are structured in a specific way, and it allows the teams to consult successfully. Each team has about eight students: one senior manager, one project manager, one senior consultant, and four-five consultants. The senior managers are very experienced and have either been in the organization for a very long time, have had outstanding internship experience, or are graduate students. There are only eight senior managers in the entire organization and they report to faculty about our clients satisfaction and our expenses. The senior managers oversee a few projects each semester, and they have a project manager report to them. There are about twenty-five project managers, and they drive the overall project by creating a scope and delegating tasks to the consultants. The senior consultant helps the project manager and the consultants by helping the consultants with their research and PowerPoint Slides. Every week we had a client call that we prepared a slide deck for, and all the consultants were assigned to create a certain amount of slides on different topics pertaining to the project. Our project manager went over our research and presentations, and she would give us edits to complete by the time of the client call. This weekly structure held all the teammates accountable and kept the team very organized. 

I think there are various reasons for the success of this team and organization. The overall structure allows individuals to learn and communicate with each other; however, I also believe that students stay very motivated in this organization. This is because the organization is competitive and it provides students a great networking opportunity for their career. Although the organization does not compete against anyone, it does offer promotions to higher positions. Students are very eager to obtain a higher position, which is why they work very hard on their teams. In addition, the students want to showcase their hard work to their clients because they could end up becoming their future employer.

Comments

  1. Professor ArvanJanuary 18, 2020 at 5:57 AM

    One comment first about what the company wanted, based on some recent conversations I've had with friends and family about specifying requirements. There is an issue of whether business processes are up to snuff or if they are lacking. If the latter, there may be an implicit hope that the software can substitute for mediocre business practices. That seems to happen fairly often, but it is foolhardy. Good business practices are still needed. And another comment on how you told this. The company wanted a package from a startup. Are there any more established products already out there? If so, was the company already using one of those? And if there were such products but the company wasn't using any of them, why did it want to go with a startup instead? These sort of questions should be anticipated and find their way into your post.

    Your description of the team and how the project played out was fine. But there are still more puzzles to consider. Did students have any prior expertise on the research they were doing? In contrast, had the company gone to a private consulting firm, would the consultants there have such expertise? If there are some areas of projects where expertise is quite scarce, that might be a reason for a company to go with a student team. I also wonder whether there was some prior Illinois connection to help make this work for your team. (For example, an alum from the Gies College of Business was at the company that hired the IBC team.) If the communication channel is already there, that can explain a lot.

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