Keys to Success

Having engaged in several consulting projects through my years at SIPA, here are the few keys to success that I have identified:

1. Client: How the client chooses to engage with the consulting team is paramount to the success of the project. One thing I believe has helped in the past is having SIPA Alumni as clients or in the executive management of the institution. They understand how the school system works and that often helps in narrowing the scope of research! (A pleasant surprise is also that they give the best recommendations of what other classes to take based on your area of interest). In addition to this, one thing I have found helpful in scoping consulting projects is understanding the intent of the client. We have to acknowledge that the organizations we work with are all doing brilliant work in their fields and have competent employees working for them—why agree to a consulting project with a student group then? And the trick to scoping a successful project scope lies in there. There are topics and areas of research that are essential to the team but they either lack the resources or expertise to conduct it. If we are able to zero in on that I think the partnership becomes most useful for the student team as well as the client. Simply put, if the client does not see value in the direction you are choosing to go—their engagement declines and the chances that your research and hard work will actually be used meaningfully are lower!

2. Teamwork: I always find myself asking this question—is it better to let students pick their own teams or have them be assigned? My conclusion is that it does not matter. What matters is conducting yourself with professionalism because this is a workspace. Respecting your colleagues and their timelines will go a long way in helping build a relationship with them even if you didn’t know them before the project began. My personal framing around relationship building in this context is that I would rather my team members think I am reliable than trying to become fast friends. There are reasons timelines and project management tools exist and they are even more relevant when the consulting projects are short! An efficient and timely deliverable helps move the project along in the pursuit of delivering a successful end product to the client. The most enriching part of working in groups has been learning from the expertise of my colleagues and another learning I would integrate here is trying to understand their interests while scoping the project.

While I have tried to list most of these down, I also must acknowledge a third factor that has affected the success of my research projects—and this is luck! In my first year of school, I randomly paired up with two other students for a project. We all brought in different perspectives, respected each other's opinions, and built a really strong working relationship which enabled us to deliver a good output each time we worked together. I think this may be because all of us were clear on why we were doing the projects we were doing. In conclusion, my last helpful tip is also to consider periodically what your intent for doing this project was. Learning a new tool? Trying to create an artifact or a report that you think will be useful? Networking? Concretely describing these will probably be the biggest enabler of success in the project! So if you haven’t done it already, give it a think and write down why you wanted to engage in this beyond just “gaining sector experience”!