The AMR Consulting Project

 

All University of California graduate programs have a final thesis-style requirement for graduation, and UCLA Anderson's version of this is AMR.  This Applied Management Research project is a two-quarter consulting assignment where teams of Anderson students match up with a specific client to help them overcome a real problem within their organization.  For the client it is a way to get cheap consulting help from business school students to help them with significant issues within their organization.  For the students, it is a way to utilize all of their business school skills in a real world situation with actual results.  In addition to full-time job recruiting, it is the most significant aspect of a student's 2nd year at Anderson.

We self-selected our teams back in the spring of last quarter.  I'm working in quite the diverse group of fellow classmates from Section A, two of whom I worked with on my original learning team last fall.  We have two students born in China, one in Korea, one in Sri Lanka, and one other asian from San Francisco.  As a big proponent of diversity, that leaves me as the only white boy.  One weakness of our team is that we're all on the more introverted side of Anderson students.  After several months as a team already, I've clearly the top 1 or 2 as far as team leader and outspokenness goes, which is something that I wouldn't be characterized in any of my previous Anderson team settings over the past year.  We've nicknamed ourselves Team Quietly Awesome.  Overall, it's a solid team and we all get along great.

We chose our client last spring, and since several of our team members were born and raised in developing countries, and since I had just returned from hanging out in African tribes over spring break, we decided to do our project with the Global Child Nutrition Foundation.  GCNF is a school feeding non-profit organization focused on fighting hunger in children in emerging market countries.  Despite having expertise in this area, and having set up school feeding programs in many countries throughout the globe, their problems are numerous, including poor relationships with their parent organization, an undefined marketing plan, and a severe lack of funding.  Our goal is that through our research of the industry and other similar organizations, to better identify their core competencies, identify potential partnerships, and create a strong marketing and communication plan to help increase fundraising, revenue generation and overall awareness (sorry for any business school jargon).

The project has been off to a bit of a slow start, however.  It took us months after we initially signed on for the project to realize this, but our main contact (Chip) who was initially setting up the project and funding it for us, didn't actually work for the client.  Chip was actually just a very passionate and significant donor in the child nutrition space who wanted us to help GCNF's cause.  This created problems, because when we started communicating with GCNF directly, they seemed unsure of who we were, what we were asking for, and did not want to send us any sensitive internal information.  Communication with the actual client was iffy at best, causing us to miss our first internal UCLA deadline to hand in a signed copy of our Letter of Understanding (basically a contract detailing what the client wants from us and what we plan to deliver) by a month and counting now.

The good news is that the communication issues seem to be behind us.  The executive committee of GCNF finally became aware of the entire situation and flew out this weekend from Baltimore to meet with our team.  It didn't make for a very relaxing Thanksgiving weekend, but it was a productive, two days of  meetings filled with lots of information sharing.  Following an all day meeting yesterday, we took them out to dinner last night, and had a follow up meeting this morning to finalize and have them finally sign our LOU.  We met with the three top executives in the organization, three people who had dedicated their entire lives to fighting hunger, which was inspirational and got me re-excited about the project.  We all wish this meeting had happened two months ago instead though, because the project deadline of late February is not very far off, and there is a lot of work left to be done with finals and winter break in the near future.  Hopefully we can build off this momentum from the weekend and start making some strong progress.


Mini-plug (since I'm trying to improve their marketing now).  Feel free to check out their website for more information and Like their page on Facebook!

http://www.gcnf.org/
http://www.facebook.com/GCNFoundation