Introduction

The Consulting Committee at the Great Lakes Institute of Management, Consultcom, is a student run body in the consulting arena, under the guidance of esteemed faculty members. Its activities broadly include Management Consulting, Strategic Management, Risk Advisory, Process/Operations Consulting, IT Consulting, Marketing/Financial Consulting etc. The committee is a breeding ground for future consulting talent.

The committee provides opportunity for liaising with Global Consultants, professionals, faculty and alumni members through organized activities, which helps students to prepare their career in consulting outside the classroom environment. Additionally, the consultcom is responsible for executing real industry projects that not only give students experience of working on consulting assignments but also provide innovative and out-of-the-box solutions to the client. It also serves as a platform for students to build their network in the Industry.

Vision:

• To deliver high caliber consulting resources for the industry around the world.
• To create and make available the knowledge and expertise to nourish the former.

Goals:

• Develop knowledge and interest about the consulting practice within student community.
• To become a hub for coordination and operation of all consulting related activities within the campus.
• To gather all resources necessary to build content and competency pertaining to consulting practice in campus.
• To become a world class student run consulting body under the mentorship of faculty and industry professionals, and bring best of the project available in industry for student community.

Our aim is not only limited to develop future consultants but also to serve the industry across different sectors and domains, the Consulting Committee thrives on the massive and diverse pool of participants across the board available at Great Lakes.

Knowledge Management:

This team targets at creating a knowledge repository by collating the expertise in the present batch. This includes making student databases based upon their domain expertise and prior work experience. This information is used by the Consultcom while approaching companies for projects. This team would also leverage on the experience of the alumni, professors and guest faculty to prepare the knowledge base for the great lakes student community.

Learning Management:

This team aims at synergizing with other committees and teams in the college so as to optimally utilize the extensive talent pool and resources available in Great Lakes. It is instrumental in organizing trainings, workshops for the students. The committee, over the years has emerged as the convergence point for not only for the present students but also for the alumni and globally renowned consulting experts. It has played a critical role in accentuating industry interaction and compile learning database as a cardinal aspect of the 'Great Lakes learning model'. This team also publish papers, articles and other materials and execute various industry projects. This team would also co-ordinate with Consulting committee of other B-Schools and understand/learn/bring in the best practices followed by them.

Business Development:

The committee focuses on sourcing live projects from the industry in order to elevate the level of consulting acumen in the students. Leveraging on its strong professional network of lecturers, guest faculty and alumni, the committee is all set to position Great Lakes as the vanguards of consulting practice in the academia and the industry.

Publication:

The Knowledge team of the Consultcom publishes monthly literature which updates the Great Lakers about the latest trends in consulting industry. This is part of Great lakes learning management team and is shared with different universities and industries around the globe.

Workshops:

The Consultcom organizes weekly workshops and case based interviews among students to help Great Lakers learn the art and science of solving cases. Cases are selected from a vast knowledge database sourced through collaboration with faculties and friendly institutions. Various learning techniques like role play, videos, group discussion are used to enhance learning experience. These activities would help students in preparing for the interviews of consulting firms.

Workshop1: Consulting Basics
Workshop2: Guesstimation
Workshop3: Identifying the Achilles Heel

Live Projects:

Consultcom has partnered with industries, firms and academicians to provide case studies and live projects for the students. Under the guidance of excellent faculty of Great Lakes, students get immense learning and training experience to work on real time business scenarios and cases. It allows the industry to tap talent from great lakes from the wealth of resources available from great lakes .On the other hand students also get the opportunity to work with renowned consultants and learn best practices of the industry. The projects vary in scope and research area that may include collecting, analyzing and interpreting data on people, processes, strategies or markets.

Guest Lectures:

These provide students with the opportunity to interact with consulting professionals and executives from leading organizations, academicians, and entrepreneurs. Thisgives students an understanding of what the industry is expecting out of them. This also motivates the Great Lakers and acts as a platform for sharing knowledge and best practices.

Guest Lecture by A.T.Kearney

Recent Activities:

We had a workshop by Mark Cosentino on consulting case based interview. Marc has twenty years of experience with case questions. He has written well over a hundred cases, while coaching, preparing and training more than eight thousand Harvard students and alumni. He has written three books involving cases and consulting.

Marc provided us the insights of work in consulting arena while discussing various cases picked up from different industry verticals. Great Lakers were overwhelmed by the knowledge and approach that Marc showed in solving diverse cases. All together a thought provoking session for all of us.

One our has batch mates Siddesh Dhuri made a carton depicting the enthusiasm of students. As is rightly said by Paul J. Meyer "Enthusiasm glows, radiates, permeates and immediately captures everyone's interest."

Competency Calculation Drive:

Consulting committee initiated a movement to quantify internal strength of vast talent pool of great lakes. It involves screening profile of entire batch and interviewing some students to analyse core competency of student community. We divided the entire batch in different vertical based upon students work experience, core competency and education background. The summary of data mining is as follows: