Business Research Projects

Jimme Keizer, Piet Kempen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781136423277
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Negocios en general

Almost all higher educational institutions have built some kind of fieldwork project into the advanced stages of their programmes and the research project should integrate theory, practice, knowledge and skills.Students should be able to apply their acquired knowledge and understanding in a manner that indicates a professional approach to their work or vocation, and have the ability to integrate knowledge and handle complexity, and formulate judgements with incomplete or limited information. It is important that they can communicate their conclusions and the knowledge and rationale underpinning these to specialist and non-specialist audiences clearly and unambiguously.Business Research Projects offers the reader a comprehensive framework for going through the successive process steps of the fieldwork project. There is a logbook which provides for each of the ten steps a checklist enabling students to document the progress of their projects and communicate about the project with their coaches and supervisors.Successful projects require specific process knowledge and skills: • Recognition and description of an organisational problem.
• Design and organisation of a research project.
• Communication with people on different levels within the organisation.
• Interviewing, listening, negotiating, giving presentations, persuading people.
• Project management.
• Developing solutions in collaboration with people in the organisation.
• Implementation of accepted solutions.

Part 1 Model of a fieldwork project

DOI: 10.4324/9780080459691-1

Introduction to Part 1

In this book we start from the assumption that students carrying out fieldwork assignments wish to achieve more than delivering a glossy final report that is never used. The basic principle of this book is that fieldwork assignments are effective if students succeed in systematically developing a solution that is adopted and implemented by management. Good assignments encourage students to deploy theories, methods and models to contribute to the solution of real problems. In practice, it does not seem to be easy for students to work in a manner such that the business organization can implement their results at the end of the project.

As a point of departure for developing an approach that leads to more effective fieldwork, we consider the fieldwork project as a management consulting project in which the company acts as principal and the student as consultant.

• The company formulates an assignment
• The student studies the causes and backgrounds, develops proposals and contributes to the implementation of these proposals.

This point of departure implies that we use the thoughts and actions of management consultants as a reference for students. The question we want to answer is what students in their role as consultant need to do to make their project successful.

part 1 outlines the approach used in this book to carry out a fieldwork assignment in the form of a consulting process. It starts by listing seven requirements that such a consulting process must meet to be successful.

We subsequently present a model of the assignment process that takes these requirements into account. This approach to the overall consulting strategy comprises three phases: the orientation phase, the research and solution phase, and the implementation phase. Within these phases, ten consecutive steps can be distinguished.

The main characteristics of this model for effective fieldwork assignments are:

• Implementation forms an explicit part of the fieldwork project
• Much attention is paid to the start of the project – the first phase comprises no less than six of the ten steps
• Much attention is paid to obtaining support for the solution that will be developed.

Chapter 1 The fieldwork project as a consulting process

DOI: 10.4324/9780080459691-2

Graduating and consultancy

The final stage of many programmes in higher vocational and university education is a fieldwork project. In such projects, students are asked to put into practice what they have learned by solving a specific organizational problem. To successfully carry out a fieldwork project one needs to have a number of skills, being able to:

• Recognize and describe a problem
• Organize the research
• Communicate with people from different levels in the organization
• Hold interviews, give presentations, listen to, negotiate with and convince people
• Independently set up a fieldwork project and carry it out according to plan
• Come up with solutions in co-operation with people from the organization
• Implement the accepted solutions.

These skills resemble the skills management consultants must possess to be able to carry out their work successfully. Consultants are faced with the task of introducing improvements in organizations where they have no authority. They cannot take decisions and give instructions themselves, since this is the domain of management. A consultant's contribution will only be effective if he or she is able to arouse interest in tackling a point for improvement in the right way at the right time. How things can go wrong is illustrated in the following case.

Case 1.1

The chair of the board of directors of an industrial concern called in a consultant who was recommended to him by a good business friend. The consultant was called in because a discussion had arisen in the concern's management about one of the subsidiaries. The topic of the discussion was whether or not the subsidiary should be sold. The consultant told the chair that he would need a few days to work on the assignment. This surprised the chair, since he and his staff had been wrestling with this problem for months, but he did not say anything about this to the consultant. Two weeks later he had another meeting with the consultant, who handed him a four-page report advising him to sell the subsidiary. The consultant also suggested a selling price. The chair and his staff were baffled by such a short report. When they asked him whether he had actually visited the subsidiary to interview people there, the consultant replied that such a visit was unnecessary as he had been able to find all necessary financial data in directly accessible sources of information. He explained that the subsidiary was too small to stand up to its competition and that it would be impossible to ever recover the capital required to obtain a better market position. The chair and his board of directors disregarded the advice and decided not to sell the subsidiary. Three years later – after heavy losses – they finally did sell, for half the price the consultant had suggested earlier. In a frank interview the chair later said: ‘The consultant was right, but we did not follow his advice because he had not done enough “preliminary work” and had not entered into discussions with our people.’

This case illustrates that effective advice needs more than a well-written report.

The position students find themselves in has much in common with that of professional management consultants. Like consultants, they enter a company or institution to help realize an organizational change. Both do research and come up with a solution for which they have to find a willing ear within the company. Both will only be successful if their work not only results in a report, but also in the decision to actually implement the solution. This, of course, requires knowledge, knowledge that is available in an educational course – for instance, knowledge on marketing, production, data processing, logistics and strategy. Besides knowledge, the ability to deal with consultative situations is of the utmost importance. This book deals particularly with this ‘skill’. To that end, we look frequently at the functioning of professional management consultants. This offers not only possibilities, but also limitations. The skills that are needed in the consulting profession in particular require a certain aptitude. One person may find it difficult to carry out an orderly interview, even though he or she is familiar with all the textbooks on the subject, while another may find conducting interviews in an orderly manner comes naturally. Some additional training can work miracles.

In this book, (future) fieldwork students are provided with the tools to carry out fieldwork projects effectively. For this purpose, the consulting process is described by means of a model that is based on our actual experience from consulting practice.¹ The use of this model is facilitated by the following:

• The fieldwork project is divided into ten steps (Ten-Step Plan, TSP)
• A step-by-step description of the necessary activities and the desired/intended end product is provided
• A checklist is given at the end of each step, to determine whether the intended objective of this step has been achieved
• A number of small cases are included to help put the knowledge acquired in this book into practice.

The TSP is discussed from the perspective of a professional consultant as much as possible – for instance, by means of short descriptions of actual cases, which reflect our experience in supervising students in fieldwork projects.

However, before we focus on the description of the TSP model, we first explain what we understand to be effective consulting – as well as an effective fieldwork project. If one is satisfied with a good report as a final product, like the consultant's report in Case 1.1, having a thorough command of professional knowledge and skills will largely suffice. However, if students want to include the acceptance and practical implementation of advice in their consulting and/or fieldwork projects, consulting skills then play an important role.

We have opted for the second approach and will therefore first examine what we consider to be effective consulting.

Effective consulting

In our view, effective consulting is the systematic development of recommended advice that is subsequently adopted and implemented by the company to which the advice is given.

Too many consulting reports, particularly those produced by students, are not used by companies. Nevertheless, students are graduating on the basis of such never-used reports. Obviously, effectiveness is not an important assessment criterion for teachers, who may settle for a performance that, in hindsight, appears to be of no use to the host company.

For this reason we will pay particular attention to the question of how the practical use of fieldwork projects can be increased. This is important to the companies and institutions where students carry out their fieldwork projects, but is of even more importance to the students themselves. Learning to give effective advice during the educational process gives students the confidence to take this through into their first job. Employers prefer employees who can start to work in a result-oriented manner immediately. It saves training time, which is very important in a time of fierce competition.

The question is how to achieve effective advice. How can one ensure that one's fieldwork produces more than a good final report that disappears unread and unused into a filing cabinet? To accomplish this, an approach that meets the following seven criteria is necessary:

1. It should be problem directed
2. It should be environment directed
3. It should be change directed
4. Open contracting is preferable
5. Conscious positioning is required
6. It should be coherent
7. It should contain state-of-the-art knowledge.

These seven requirements are the building blocks for the TSP, which is described in this book as a guide to effective graduation projects.

Problem directed

The more urgent a problem is in a company, the more people within that company will be willing to make time to work on a solution. If profit margins are decreasing, people will be interested in advice on lowering the stock costs.

In such situations, management's interest in realizing non-mandatory environmental targets will be put on the back-burner. A student who is given the assignment to work out the stock cost issue will therefore have a better chance that his or her advice will be adopted than the student working on the environmental issue, no matter how interesting and relevant the environmental issues may be.

In this respect, students are vulnerable. They offer to take on an assignment because they have to carry out a fieldwork project. Companies are ever willing to come up with a problem to pose to students. Usually, professional consultants encounter a much more favourable scenario when asked for their help.

Aware of their starting position, students should be selective in accepting a project assignment. Before they start to work on the project, the urgency of the problem² and the chances of success should be considered. This does not imply that, in a situation of decreasing margins, an environmental issue is principally unattractive. During the initial orientation, a student could conclude that better energy control could lead to substantial cost savings. Thus, a student is sometimes also able to raise the level of urgency of the problem, thereby making the project more attractive and creating a relevant fieldwork project.

External orientation

Most internal company problems have external causes, relating to the competitive environment in which companies are working. In this environment there will be leaders and stragglers. To become and remain part of the leader group – or at least maintain contact with the ‘midfield’ companies – the company's own competitive position requires continuous efforts. Indicators on which companies can benchmark are:

• High turnover and profit
• Low costs
• High customer orientation
• Good service
• High delivery reliability...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• Preface
• About the authors
• Part 1 Model of a fieldwork project
• Part 2 The Ten-Step Plan
• Part 3 Divergent scenarios
• References
• Index