How to train Management Consultants & Business Analysts

In this lecture I will briefly discuss what you can expect from this course

In the course you will learn the following things:

1. How to define the profile of the ideal consultant

2. What options are on the table when it comes to training consultants and business analysts

3. How to estimate the costs of each every type of training

4. How to allocate time to training

5. How to build the training machine for your firm

   
   

A few words about your humble teacher

Here I will show you how the course is organized and how you can make the most out of it

Here I will show you what to do if a blurry image appears

Here I will show you how to find additional resources attached to the coruse like Excel files, presentations, links etc.

In the second section I will show you how to define the ideal profile of an employee. For that we will use management consultants as an example. We will also talk about all the element around the employee that you have to create to make sure that the business analysts / consultants are working efficiently

In the second section I will explain the importance of teaching and how to implement it in your team or company. If you want to do fast, efficiently good projects you have to have the right kind of people. You can say that preparation for the consulting project starts with proper teaching. In this section I will discuss how through teaching get good business analysts.

Consulting is a team work so you have to define what values you want your team to follow. This is crucial as it will be something that will be the bases for the team culture. In this lecture I will show my values that provide good ground for managing properly the consulting project 

As we discuss previously you want to turn inexperienced graduates into seasoned consultants. This gives you greater chances of success during the project. Therefore, you have to define the profile of an ideal consultant and set your team member on the course to achieve this level. In this lecture I will also show you the profile I have defined for an ideal team member 

For your team to cooperate you have to create and teach them standards, templates as well as turn into modules as much as possible your process and end-products. In the next lectures I will show you in details how to achieve it 

A lot of things are repetitive. Therefore, it makes sense to standardize everything. In this lecture we will show to do it in practice. 

Next step after you created standards is to create templates. In this lecture I will explain how to do it in practice

For some things standards cannot be applied straightforward. You need to introduce modules to move forward. I will show you in this lecture how to implement it in practice

Standard folder structure is important  tool to save time and introduce order. I will show you the principles of using it as well as a practical exampl

Here I will show you how in practice to train your people

In this section I will discuss what options you can use to train business analysts and management consultants. We will discuss things like: Lesson Learnt, Project Database, Offline Courses, Online Courses, Workshops, Prob-Bono projects, Frameworks, Mentorship

The first step is to create a database of past projects. You want to have all your deliverables ordered in one place & standardized. In this lecture I will show you the approach to creating the past project database:

1. Define templates & standards

2. Create structure for cooperation

3. Rework of deliverables after the end of the project

4. Put the deliverables in the right place

5. Link the materials to the database

We said that creating a database is a 5-step process. Now we will go a little bit deeper into 2 first steps: Define templates & standards and Create structure for cooperation

In this lecture I will show you an example of simple database of past consulting projects in a form of an Excel sheet with links to resources

On the basis of past projects you can create so called lesson learnt – things you have learned thanks to the project. Lesson learnt are usually put in a form of a short (50-70 slides) presentation. We will discuss this important element in this lecture espiecially what you can find the such a presentation

The backbone of every training system are the courses. We have 2 types of courses: offline and online. Here we will discuss the offline courses and the process of creating such courses.

The backbone of every training system are the courses. We have 2 types of courses: offline and online. Here we will discuss the online courses and the process of creating such courses.

In order to know what kind of online and offfline courses you have to create to have to first generate a map of the skills, knowledge you want to pass to your management consultants and business analyts. Here I will show you an example of such a map

In order to know what kind of online and offfline courses you have to create to have to first generate a map of the skills, knowledge you want to pass to your management consultants and business analyts. Here I will show you an example of such a map

In order to know what kind of online and offfline courses you have to create to have to first generate a map of the skills, knowledge you want to pass to your management consultants and business analyts. Here I will show you an example of such a map

Some things especially soft skills require human touch. For those mentorship is a great tool. Below a few reasons why makes sense to use it. Let’s see how you can build the mentorship / coaching in your firm. We will look at the process in this lecture

Workshop is:

• An event that is designed to teach participants about certain areas or certain skills

• Usually it takes a form of a case study that is solved in small groups (3-5 people)

• It can last a 3-5 hours or in some cases a few days (up to 3-5 days)

In this lecture we will discuss the benefits of organizing workshops

You can deliver pro bono project to 3 main groups of: Non-profits, Government or government owned services, Small business. We will discuss what additional benefits pro-bono projects offer

By frameworks we mean:

• Structured approach to a certain aspect / problem / area

• It helps you decide what to do and what are the available options

Frameworks creation offer a lot of benefits. We will discuss them in this lecture. We will also see what could be the source of frameworks

Here I will show you examples of frameworks

Here I will show you examples of frameworks

We can divide the training methods into 2 main groups: Low cost methods and Expensive methods. We will discuss what belongs to which group and how you should choose the proper mix of methods

In the section number 4 I will show you how to estimate the costs of training for different types of training. You will get ready made templates that you can use to estimate the costs in your firm. In every business you have to set right 3 machines to be able to scale. Training is one of those 3 big machines that a consulting firms needs to grow and deliver value to customers:

• Recruitment and Training.

• Analyzes and Presentations

• Scalable Sales & Marketing

When it comes to the size there are 2 dimensions: Money & Time

Here we will talk about the money.

In this section we will talk about how big the training machine should be:

• What does influence the size of the training machine?

• How much does it cost?

• How to calculate the size of the training machine

• How to estimate the budget

• How to allocate time

There are certain things that impact the size of the training machine. We will discuss them in this section

Training machine requires 2 things: money and time. Now we will go a little bit deeper into how much money you have to invest and what influences it. In this lecture I will share with you a few information about the firm that we will be analyzing

In this lecture we will estimate the costs of Lesson Learnt and Past Project Database

In this lecture we will estimate the costs of offline courses

In this lecture we will estimate the costs of Online Coures

In this lecture we will estimate the costs of Workshops

In this lecture we will estimate the costs of Mentorship Program

In this lecture we will estimate the costs of Pro-bono Projects

In this lecture we will estimate the costs of Creating Frameworks

In this lecture we will summarize the cost estimated in the previous lectures

At the end we will relate the estimated costs of the training machine to the revenue.

In this section we will discuss how to allocate time to training, both content creation as well as consumption of the content created by business analysts and consultants. We said previously that for creating and running the training machine you need 2 resources. So far, we have talked only about money. It’s time to talk a little bit about time. In the case of Time there are 2 aspects that we have to consider: 

• When we allocate the hours

• How many hours we must allocate

There are some rules for that will make it easier for you to allocate time for training. We will discuss them in this lecture:

• Have a plan and a map of content to be prepared

• Use the low seasons to create the content

• Use the low seasons to train

• Use more flexible methods of training

• Define the model of training

• Do some training at lower pace in high season

• Define how many hours you should allocate to create content (pace for content creation)

• Define how many hours you should allocate to studying (pace for content consumption)

Let’s try to estimate how much time you have to devote to training. For this cases study we will go back to consulting firm we have previously introduced. We will discuss the case study that we have previously introduced

Here we will have a look how much time we have to devote to different components of the training machine: online courses, offline courses, pro-bono projects, mentorship, lesson learnt, workshops etc

In the last section, I will show you how to build the training system in practice. I will first show you the whole process and we will discuss each and every element of this process that at the end will help you deliver the target. There will be plenty of case studies that will teach you how to make certain choices when it comes to the training process. Training is one of the 3 big machines that consulting firms need to grow and deliver value to customers. We know how big it has to be let’s see how to build it. In this section we will talk about the following issues:

• Process of building the training machine

• How to define the budget

• Pick the right mix of methods

• Decide on whether to make or buy the training

• Prepare the training machine

• How to define the pace of creating content

• Execute & modify the training machine

Let’s see how you can build the training machine. It consists of 5 stages:

• Define the budget

• Pick the right mix of methods

• Make-or-buy analysis

• Prepare

• Execute & modify

We will discuss in detail the stages in the next lectures

As you may remember there are 5 stages of creating the training machine. Defining the budget is the first one and we will discuss it here in more details

Imagine that you have to analyze what is a better option - hire cheap employees & devote a lot to teaching them or hire more experienced yet expensive people. We will solve a case study in the next few lectures to see what solution would be the best choice.

In this lecture, we will see what is the impact of recruiting from top universities

In this lecture we will see what is the impact of recruiting from outside the top universities

We will compare both options in this lecture

As you may remember there are 5 stages of creating the training machine. Picking the right mix is the second stage and we will discuss it in more details in this lecture

As you may remember there are 5 stages of creating the training machine. Let’s discuss in more detail the make-or-buy analysis. In make-or-buy analysis, we compare the total cost of making and the total cost of buying. Remember also that the make-or-buy result will heavily depend on the scale as in the buy case we have a lot of fixed costs. In the next lecture, we will go a little bit deeper into this area and we will have a look at 2 case studies.

The total cost of ownership is:

• All the costs related to owning or using a specific item/thing

• It will also include the cost of lost opportunity i.e. money not earned due to spending time on repairing the thing

Let’s compare the cost of owning a car and using a rideshare/taxi / cab service

Imagine that you have to analyze for a consulting firm whether it makes sense or not to produce an online course devoted to Data Science. In this lecture, I will show you a few pieces of information about the firm that we will use to pick the optimal solution.

In this lecture, we will solve the previously introduced case study. We will have a look at the make option

In this lecture we will solve previously introduce case study. We will have a look at the buy option and we will compare make and buy options.

In this lecture we will solve previously introduce case study. We will have a look at the buy option and we will compare make and buy options.

In some cases even if it is more expensive to make than to buy it still makes sense to make:

• There is no content on the right level

• Your standard differs from the general standards

• You treat the teaching system also as a standardization tool

• You grow drastically in terms of people

• You want to keep the knowledge to yourself

• There are not specialists in a specific area

• Legal reasons & NDAs

As you may remember there are 5 stages of creating the training machine. Let’s discuss what you have to do in terms of preparation. During the Preparation phase you have to do the following things:

• Prepare the content for the activities done internally

• Find providers for the rest

• Schedule the activities given assumed pace of learning for each and every employee

Once you have picked the right mix and decided what to make, and what to buy you should set the deadlines & set the pace of preparing content

Let’s see, using the Supply Chain course, how you can create content for the training activities that you want to deliver internally.

Here I will show you the course plan that we have created for Supply Chain course

Here I will show you all the resources we have created to deliver the course. For the supply chain course we have created a lot of resources. We will shortly discuss them in this lecture

By Pace we mean:

• The speed of creating content given your goals, deadlines, and the time needed to create a specific type of content

• In the case of content creation, we can measure the pace  in # of pieces of content produced per period, or man-hours devoted to content creation per period

To make sure that you deliver what you have planned you have to define the pace of content creation.

In this lecture, we will calculate the pace

As you may remember there are 5 stages of creating the training machine.

The last stage is the easiest one. You just have to carry out the plan and modify it if needed. This entails:

• Carry out activities according to plan

• Modify if needed (new employees, new projects, change of the content, etc.)

Let’s see how your execution team will change depending on the size of the firm