MBA Capstone Consulting Project

The capstone consulting project for managers in the United States, set with a cooperative in central Minnesota and eastern North Dakota and drawing on state privacy law and US grocery market conditions: the final course of the MBA, in which teams of students carry out a twelve-week consulting engagement for a client organization and bring the whole program to bear on one real problem: what consultants do and why clients hire them, Schein's models of the consulting relationship, trust, confidentiality and conflicts of interest, and how AI is changing the industry; scoping with situation, complication and question, SMART problem statements, stakeholder maps, engagement proposals and the control of scope creep; issue trees that are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive, testable hypotheses, day-one answers and hypothesis-driven workplans; interviews, observation, member surveys with margins of error, qualitative coding and careful use of benchmarks; market and customer analysis with trade areas, segmentation, share of wallet, perception tests and top-down and bottom-up sizing; financial and operational analysis with reconciled data, profit trees, shrink, promotions, scheduling and store contribution; synthesis with the so-what test and Minto's pyramid principle; options evaluated with agreed weights and sensitivity tests; business cases with scenarios, tornado charts, break-even and risk registers; implementation with critical paths, governance, RACI charts, leading indicators and change plans; storylines, action titles and honest charts; and the final board presentation, handover and reflection. The main case follows a team advising Meadowlark Co-op, a member-owned retailer with 22 grocery stores, on restoring grocery margin and its patronage refund while winning younger members, with runnable Python examples throughout.

MBA-699 3 credits 12 lessons · 4 h 1 min ▶ Video lessons coming soon

Offered by HSM University · MBA Core

This is the American version of this course. See the Canadian version.

What you'll learn

Explain what management consultants do, why clients hire them, the main models of the consulting relationship and how trust, ethics and conflicts of interest shape an engagement.
Turn a client's symptoms into a specific, measurable problem statement using situation, complication and question, and write an engagement proposal with scope, exclusions, deliverables and success criteria.
Structure a problem with mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive issue trees, state testable hypotheses with disconfirming tests, and build a hypothesis-driven workplan.
Design and conduct interviews, surveys and secondary research, calculate margins of error, code qualitative evidence and judge the quality of benchmarks.
Analyze markets and customers through trade areas, segmentation, share of wallet, perception tests and top-down and bottom-up market sizing.
Analyze financial and operational performance with reconciled data, profit trees, benchmark gaps and contribution analysis, avoiding double counting.
Synthesize findings into insights with the so-what test, weigh evidence explicitly, and organize conclusions with the pyramid principle.
Generate coherent options that include a radical alternative, evaluate them against agreed criteria and weights, and test the robustness of the ranking.
Build a business case with ramp-up, scenarios, tornado analysis and break-even, set out a risk register, and frame a recommendation as specific decisions.
Plan implementation with critical path analysis, light governance, a RACI chart with single accountability, leading indicators and a change plan that builds client capability.
Write storylines with action titles and clear horizontal and vertical logic, choose honest charts, write executive summaries and pre-wire stakeholders.
Present a recommendation to a board, handle questions honestly, hand over the work, and reflect on the engagement to improve future practice.

Course content

12 lessons · 4 h 1 min total · final exam

1 What consulting is: the capstone engagement and the client relationship 23 min · quiz
2 Scoping the engagement: the problem statement and the proposal 20 min · quiz
3 Structuring problems: issue trees, hypotheses and the workplan 20 min · quiz
4 Research: interviews, surveys and secondary data 20 min · quiz
5 Analysis I: market and customer 20 min · quiz
6 Analysis II: financial and operational 20 min · quiz
7 Synthesis: from findings to insight 19 min · quiz
8 Developing and evaluating options 19 min · quiz
9 Making recommendations: the business case and risks 19 min · quiz
10 Implementation planning and change 20 min · quiz
11 Storylining and slide craft 20 min · quiz
12 Capstone: the final client presentation and reflection 20 min · quiz
E Final exam 20 questions

Requirements

Recommended background. You can start any course at any time.