D'construct Report @ ISB

Oct 17th, 2007– Diamond Consultants @ ISB for the finals of the D'construct Competition

Participants
Vinod Nair - Managing Partner, India
Govind Balan – Sr Mgr Telecom Practice

Case Competition:
Simulation of a client consulting assignment – real live issues that were worked on

Feedback on the case competition:

Simulation of client interactions was a good experience
Choice of sector and topic was relevant
Backing up recommendations with the data – good approach
Clarity of Expectations/requirements

Vinod:

Imparting structure to the problem and drawing boundary around the same
Spending considerable time ahead to help customer define the requirement or the problem

As a consultant, data driven approach exhibiting a structured method to problem solving is best.

What diamond was looking for:

Telecom – degree of knowledge, understanding of the sector brought to the table
Knowledge that goes beyond the online resource
Structure – Have you understood the problem theory, have you understand what is being asked to solve
Flow - Is the logic flowing smoothly, do we see the overall structure of the problem solving effort
Presentation – written and oral
Interaction – Q&A, how do you interact with the customer, subjectively + overall impact

Feedback from Diamond Team:

+ve:

Quality of work was very impressive
Very impressed with the content that was picked
The issues that were learnt and data collected and analysis was very impressive
Very professional

-ve:

Govind:
-How easy are the slides, to read and also visually
-Present sources of data
-Not content, focus on the message and then pick data to support the message
-Don’t read off the slide, impact is powerful if the speech complements whats on the slide
-Anything that is not thoroughly done, exercise caution while answering, if not sure, admit the same
-When answering questions, if one of the team mates has answered the question to the client satisfaction, avoid piling on answers on the same

Vinod:
-Structuring is very important – has steep learning curve
Client was looking at 3 things
1.Which markets/circles to go after
2.What segments to look at
3.What do the segments need

Teams should have set this upfront instead giving a presentation on the entire Indian telecom scenario

About Q&A Session:

In a team env, when it comes to interaction with external clients, there is a pyramid where one person leads the response with others supporting.

Congrats to the winning team of Harsh Singhal, Gaurav Bagaria, Ashish Aluwhalia, Sameer Desai