Management students’ capstone project to propel VT’s HR Service Center towards enhanced efficiency and client satisfaction
Pamplin College of Business seniors from the MGT 4084: Management Consulting course applied their theoretical knowledge with practical application, providing holistic solutions to their client, Virginia Tech's Human Resources Service Center.
Recently, a team of seniors from the Pamplin College of Business embarked on a semester-long journey, diving into the real-world complexities of organizational improvement.
Students in the capstone course for the management consulting and analytics major were tasked with analyzing the status of the Virginia Tech Human Resources Service Center, part of the Division of Human Resources (HR).
As the first point of contact for Virginia Tech’s 13,000 full- and part-time employees, future employees, and other external stakeholders that HR provides services to, the HR service center continuously strives to further enhance the effectiveness of the center. As such, the service center tasked the student consulting team to holistically analyze the current status, strengths and weaknesses, and improvement opportunities to further drive productivity and client satisfaction.
Guided by Dirk Buengel, associate professor of practice in the Management Department, MGT 4084: Management Consulting is a 100 percent experiential learning course. Students Charlie Davis, Robert Lalayan, Andrea Marucci, Becca O’Connor, and Rio Sharp did not use textbooks in the course, rather, they applied their theoretical knowledge with practical application, providing holistic solutions to their clients utilizing the integration of all business disciplines.
Weekly meetings between the students and representatives from the service center were the norm, and the student team was provided with regular feedback from representatives of the service center. The student team conducted interviews with members of service center leadership and team, as well as surveys of and interviews with various internal and external stakeholders.
Utilizing several consulting tools to assist the service center such as stakeholder mapping and a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis, the students performed a process analysis of success-critical procedures in the service center to identify opportunities for improvement. This, combined with an examination of internal customer feedback and detailed benchmarking of other universities and their service centers, allowed the student team to identify best practice recommendations for Virginia Tech’s HR Service Center.
“The students prepared well, did their research, and gave their final presentation to several members of the HR leadership group,” said Curtis Mabry, assistant vice president, HR consulting and strategic initiatives.
“Through their work, the consulting team validated HR’s own research and provided additional tools and resources to consider as we make changes to current systems and processes.”
The management consulting team’s final presentation to Monica Crouse, interim manager of the service center, and her colleagues was met with enthusiasm.
“It was exceptional and exceeded all expectations,” she said. “Their information was validating, as we were conducting research and doing work independent of the student consulting, and our ideas were very much aligned as to how to best optimize the HR Service Center.”
“All projects that we cover in our capstone course are real-world projects where the client has a real issue and business pain point that our consulting teams find solutions for,” Buengel explained. “With this, there is a clear win-win situation – the real-world clients receive value-adding pro bono consulting services from our management consulting majors while our students have an amazing real-world experience, one which marks the transition from academia to the consulting world and which gives our students a head-start for their careers.”
