Business consultants need a wide range of skills to address clients’ needs and deliver successful interventions. In this essay, you will critically discuss skills a consultant should excel at based on your own experience.
This essay should not be more than 3000 words in length.
The Task
Your essay should discuss each stage of any one of the following consultancy processes:
The Facilitator Consultancy Process: Probing, Listen, Observe, Decide
Business Analysis Steps: Define, Measure, Analyse, Solve, Report
SPIN Model: Situation, Problem, Improvement, Net Benefit
Use any one of the above processes as a structure for your essay. In your essay, you will reflect on a personal example from your private or professional life and put it into the perspective of consultancy work. You may use an event or situation where you helped a colleague or friend in the recent past. A good example from a recent paper submission was about how an English native-speaking student helped another non-native speaker to improve language skills over the course of a semester using various consultancy methods which resulted in increasingly higher marks (i.e. measurable success). The student used the SPIN model to reflect on that experience of helping a fellow student and to critically discuss that experience in the context of Business Analysis and Consultancy. For your essay, you will need to start thinking about a particular situation/experience where you helped someone and how you actually did it referring to the consultancy skills that you have learned in this course. Before you start writing, you may want to ask yourself the following questions:
What did you do to identify the problem?
How did you approach him/her?
Were you thinking about success factors that would clearly indicate whether your help was successful?
