Instructor
Linda Blair
Zayna Khayat
Target Audience
This course is a recommended and qualifying course in the Rotman School of Management’s major in Health Sector Management (and the Rotman Consulting Major). This course aims to improve your ability to formulate and implement organizational strategy and improve performance in healthcare and life sciences organizations in the public and private sectors. The course will help prepare students for leadership roles in healthcare management and consulting. Consequently, students interested in consulting careers, even outside of healthcare, will develop critical skills for the next stage of their career.
Students are strongly encouraged to complete the fall course Health Sector Strategy and Organization prior to taking Health Care Consulting. Those students who have not completed Health Sector Strategy and Organization will require permission from the instructor in order to enrol.
Course Description
This course is intended to provide a field application experience as part of your overall Rotman learning experience. As such, the course has several objectives:
- To encourage you to use the mix of functional skills and tools you have learned in previous Rotman courses in the first year and the second year fall semester.
- To take those skills and tools from their abstract presentation or artificial case study settings and use them in a real (and important) management setting in a real organization.
- To show, in way that cannot be done in the classroom, how knowledge must be adapted to fit real problems or opportunities.
- To expose you to the craft and process of management consulting.
- To further develop your leadership and team effectiveness skills.
This course will provide a supervised experience in the art and science of (a) shaping client-defined issues in ways that make them tractable and (b) applying new ideas effectively in complex organizational settings. The field application takes the form of a consulting project, but this is not primarily a course in how to do garden-variety consulting. For those who have not had the consulting experience yet, it will, of course, provide the basics. But it will also give you experience with techniques, approaches, and coping mechanisms for problem solving in unstructured, sometimes ambiguous, and imperfect situations, especially when you have to influence a situation by expertise and persuasion rather than having direct control over it, and within a confined time frame. You will, in other words, be confronting the reality that most managers and consultants face most of the time.
Course Structure
The client engagement is the heart of the course, and you will be involved in helping to shape its direction and content as well as carry it out and effectively engage your clients with your findings and recommendations. The course is structured to maximize your learning about both the content of the project itself and about how to work effectively in a project-oriented, team-based environment. The most important elements of the course structure are:
1) A “tutorial” approach to your teams’ initial work plan development, problem diagnosis and problem solving, management of client-team and within-team issues, and final presentations.
2) Use of course instructors. Each team will have access to two instructors ― Linda Blair, (Principal, Deloitte Consulting) and Dr. Zayna Khayat (Adjunct Professor, Rotman School), and three co-instructors.
3) An abridged series of class sessions designed to orient you to the course, our expectations, prepare you for the project, and introduce you to the core consulting skills you will use.
4) Preparation of a Statement of Work that will lay out the scope of work, resources required, timeline, workplan and deliverables. An initial draft of the Statement will be submitted for feedback. Each team will add a confidential note to the faculty that describes your hunches about possible hidden agendas, difficulties you think you may encounter in executing the project, and what resources you think you will need to successfully complete the project within the time frame.
5) Preparation for and participation in weekly check-ins with your assigned course instructor to review progress on the project. All team members must attend.
6) A storyboard and “dry-run” of your final presentation of findings and recommendations to your client. All team members will receive feedback on content and presentation skills.
7) Presentation of the project report to the client and final written report.
8) A final wrap-up session with your classmates.