How to build successful business school partnerships

How to build successful business school partnerships

Discover insights behind the award-winning Birmingham MBA Deloitte Consultancy Challenge

Andrew Miles, corporate relations manager at Birmingham Business School, spoke to Times Higher Education about the Birmingham MBA Deloitte Consultancy Challenge. This groundbreaking programme has been running for 14 years and recently won the Best Business School Partnership Award in association with Perlego at the Association of MBAs (AMBA) and Business Graduates Association (BGA) Excellence Awards.

Tell us about this partnership and what makes it unique.

I would say longevity. The partnership is one based on innovation, continuity, trust and friendship. The latter cannot be understated; we have built a firm friendship with those we work with at Deloitte. This has led to an even greater commitment on both sides to make the Consultancy Challenge the very best it can be for MBA students. The programme is truly distinctive due to our combined efforts to refresh it each year, keeping it relevant and taking into account issues arising globally.

How did it feel when the winner announcement was made?

It was a terrific experience. It was already such an honour to be up for the award alongside five other renowned business schools from around the world. And then to win and see the partnership recognised in this way has just been incredibly rewarding. We were on a table together with the Deloitte team and it was great to be able to celebrate what we have built.

What are the origins of the partnership behind the Consultancy Challenge?

Many of our MBA students express a desire to move into consultancy, so we wanted to respond to that, not simply by incorporating consultancy skills into the curriculum and enabling them to take on consultancy projects as part of their dissertation. We do that anyway, as do most business schools. We wanted to offer them something unique, such as a fully immersive consultancy training programme. 

We turned to Deloitte as they were already employing our MBA cohorts and putting their associates through our executive programme. So we decided to approach them to see if they would agree to design and deliver such a programme with us. This is where the value of having a good advisory board comes in because one of our members was a Deloitte partner willing to champion the idea. With that solidified, we were introduced to a Deloitte team to begin work. A member of our faculty, Paul Lewis, had worked for Deloitte prior to joining academia, so he helped form the design team and has been integral to the partnership ever since.

What do you think most excites students about this initiative, and what do they gain from the experience?

Working with a top global employer. Deloitte is one of the largest financial services companies in the world. Students gain access to Deloitte and network with their senior leaders through to the partner level, which really meets expectations for those doing an MBA. 

They also enjoy the opportunity to engage in the consultancy scenario, which we base around a real company’s strategic aims. ESG [environmental, social and governance] targets and geographical expansion plans are key considerations for the students to factor into their client solution. 

Another unique element of the programme is the way in which we film the student teams interviewing their client board from one angle, and film the board’s response from the opposite angle. We live-edit these into one screen to enable students to immediately watch it with a Deloitte facilitator and review how well they built rapport with the different board members, who are played by senior members of Deloitte to make it feel very real. 

This ensures that, in addition to learning technical consultancy skills, students get to practice, witness and critique their own listening skills and ability to gain the trust of their client. And they can only really do that if they see how they performed and what response they received. It’s usually the session the students dread the most but gain the most from.

How has the partnership evolved over the last 14 years?

Key to the success of the programme right from the outset has been to acquire detailed feedback from every student. In doing so, we have always been able to improve the programme year on year. We learnt early on that at the MBA level, the students will deep dive into any case we give them, spotting anything that does not add up. So, we’ve had to learn how to develop meticulously detailed client case scenarios that are far more than just business games but robust end-to-end business simulations that can span an entire week. 

In short, by partnering in this way, we have married our teaching expertise with Deloitte’s consultancy expertise. Over time, we have identified new methods of delivery and built a unique skill set together to the point where neither party could attain the standard we now achieve without the other. 

After the partnership had been well established, we brought in a member of our advisory board as a critical friend to ensure that neither party was becoming complacent as a result of the success of the programme. Marc Stone, commercial adviser for transformation at the Cabinet Office and Treasury, works with both parties to see where we can still innovate in terms of design and industry relevance.

Most significantly, Deloitte has recruited from the programme over the years. Some of those recruits have gone on to deliver some of the training sessions and partake in the design, bringing the programme and the partnership full circle.

What’s next for this partnership with Deloitte, and what does the future hold?

The AMBA & BGA Excellence Award win is a huge validation of the programme and has driven home the benefit of the partnership to both us and Deloitte, so there is certainly more we plan to do together.

We have developed a similar challenge in responsible business for undergraduates and the winning students have gone on to undertake internships with Deloitte. And, of course, we will continue to refresh and add new elements to the MBA programme together. 

Until now, this has been largely a teaching collaboration, but we would like to move it forward as a research partnership spanning the university. The team we work with at Deloitte do a lot of work in the sphere of health, so we foresee the opportunity to expand the partnership beyond the business school to include a research and commercial partnership with our colleges of medical and life sciences.

Edgar Meyer, dean of Birmingham Business School, says, “Meeting with the Deloitte team and experiencing their commitment to our MBA programme has been one of the great joys for me in recently joining Birmingham Business School. I am in awe of the student feedback we receive for the programme and learning how they succeed in their chosen careers. External partnerships are critical to a business school’s success and ours with Deloitte is quite simply meritorious.” 

Perlego will be at the AMBA & BGA Global Conference in Budapest from 12-15 May 2024. Visit the Perlego stand or www.perlego.com/institutions to find out more about how Perlego can support your strategic initiatives. Learn more about Birmingham Business School here.