Business Consulting

Student-Consultants: Individual Assignment 1 Proposal Writing for BUSI640

1. Read the case study #1 (De Beers- Attawapiskat) a couple of times to get a sense of the situation, circumstances, and information.
2. Decide what issue(s) and/or opportunity(s) you would like to address as a consultant for De Beers regarding the situation.
3. Prepare the proposal structure (maximum in total of 8 pages with title page and reference page) and address it to the CEO of De Beers:
      – Title Page
      – Content pages
        – Reference pages 
        – only the Reference page is APA
4. Proposal Considerations
   – as a start, you have the option of providing a cover letter attached to the proposal start, but it is not required. If you use a cover letter keep this letter very brief and not repeating what is inside the proposal

“Proposal Writing” (review/ideas):

1. Review the generic format/example (a nice starting point) in Moodle. The generic example is only a very general guide and feel free to design your own with your own ideas/sections/content with the purpose to obtain the contract to the work.
2. Read/review Kubr textbook (pages 171-174 and 225-227)

iii. Read/review Wickham textbook (pages 45-48 and 68-74)

1. Review the ppt information found in Moodle to get a sense of the feel, look, read, and purpose of the proposal.

Creativity. Be creative and keep in mind that every proposal is different and needs to tie into the situation. – in the proposal you do not want to go to far into recommendations, as that is done once you have the contract (i.e. when the client accepts your proposal and signs off on it). In the proposal you want the client to know you have a good feel/idea of their situation and some preliminary thoughts on process/diagnosis/recommendations but not so much on solutions that the client will then “do the work themselves” based on your intervention plan.
Preliminary Use of Diagnostic Tools for Proposal. Keep in mind for the proposal that also you will refer to the tools within the proposal writeup, use them only briefly, and share only a limited amount of results/findings from them in the proposal (i.e. perhaps you will use two/three of SWOT/PESTLE/Porter’s for example although you can vary) but remember to only include very basic/brief information/results from their preliminary limited use…the reason is that if you give a lot of information based on the diagnostic tools then the client may not hire you….if a lot of the diagnostic information/results is in the proposal they won’t need to hire you!!!
In brief, the client should know what tools you expect to use and just enough information of how you have initially used them/minimal results information to get an initial sense (diagnosis) of the problem/situation, without a full-scale, detailed description of the results (that is for individual Assignment 2).
Student-Consultant Purpose. One of the main purposes of Assignment 1 (proposal) is to help the student-consultant to begin thinking like an external consultant and to feel and think how THEY want to address the potential client and obtain the contract through their proposal design/approach. The proposal is an important step in the First Phase of consulting (“Entry Stage”).
I hope this is helpful information for our student-consultants.
Brent