Consulting Approach to Problem Solving

This is the #3 course in the specialization on management consulting. Management consultants excel at solving difficult and complex business problems. How do they do this? Shouldn’t clients know more about their situation than external consultants? Consultants are trained to systematically break down problems into logical pieces, then aggressively pursue answers with data: • Think about the problem broadly; strategy, operations, people, technology • Define the problem clearly; articulate “what does success look like?” • Break the problem into “buckets” so it is easy to understand • Use hypotheses to “guess” your way to the potential answer(s) • Find and clean up messy data; convert the data into useful recommendations