PGDM and PGEMP join hands to make BCP a success!

Business Consulting Projects, a unique industry-integration pedagogy at SPJIMR to expose the students to the world of consulting and providing exposure to problem framing and dealing with ambiguity, is in its second year since inception. The students, in the course of this program, take up live consulting projects from the industry and conduct extensive secondary research to arrive at the problem definition for their clients.

The BCP initiative is a result of a fruitful collaboration between two programs at SPJIMR – the PGDM (2-year full time Post Graduate Diploma in Management) and the PGEMP (Post Graduate Executive Management Program) programs. The executives from the PGEMP program are the Clients who bring the live projects from their work organizations and the PGDM participants are the Consultants who perform extensive research on the ‘symptoms’ of the project to arrive at the problem definition. It is a win-win situation for all with the PGEMP executives being benefited with a direction to their projects and the PGDM participants getting a real-time exposure to the industry and the importance of research in any consulting project.

With increasing the interaction between the two programs being an important agenda of this initiative, there were several formal and informal meetings organized between the Clients and the Consultants, where the Clients were periodically apprised of the progress of the projects. The feedback on this initiative from the industry has been encouragingly positive. “The team did extremely well, identifying the problem and defining it in context of the domestic market. The insights given on how the problem can be handled are extremely helpful with limited understanding they had”, says Snehil Kumar, a participant from the PGEMP program. “This has been a great learning and enriching experience for me from my various interactions with the highly energized, creative and enterprising team of consultants assigned to the project. The study carried out by the consultants has also provided new insights into the need analysis have been extremely helpful to me in conceptualizing and planning the project”. 

Clearly, the BCP as an initiative is on the right track in achieving the goals it set out to achieve, with each year being better than the previous. It also stands as a testimony to the idea of collaboration between various programs of an institute to create a better learning atmosphere and leveraging the best of all worlds.

~Srikant Jhanwar PGDM 2014 Operations