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| By Rama Srithara Ramanujam, MBA ‘15 |
The Business Marketing Academy has a tradition of announcing the academy project teams during the BMA annual holiday party, and I was excited to have been assigned to a project for an American multinational conglomerate. As I reflect on my academy project experience, I realize its importance in preparing me for my summer internship. It was a great opportunity to learn about effective storyboarding and client engagement.
Structured approach
Over winter break, our team kicked off the project with initial research on our client and their industry. As this was a 12-week project, we knew it was critical to map out the project timeline with checkpoints and intermediate reviews with the client to ensure we were aligned with the executive sponsors and the project goals and deliverables.
Right after the planning phase, we set out to understand the current business situation. The team interviewed several corporate managers across business units to understand the process bottlenecks and challenges the organization was facing. A good balance between internal and external research was essential to gain substantial insights that would help design our strategy.
Behavioral Psychology in Business
The academic curriculum and case-based learning in the Kelley MBA program taught me the key frameworks to use in assessing a business challenge and allowed me to develop my analytical thinking skills by discussing complex, real-life scenarios. My experience working on the academy project gave me the opportunity to see how theory can really differ from practice.
As future managers, while we would be involved in designing the strategy for any business unit or an organization as a whole, the academy project exposed me to the challenges organizations face in the implementation of a strategy. For our team specifically, the biggest challenge was managing perceptions of the strategic plan within (employees) and outside (customers and channels) the organization. And this is where organizational behavior, organizational culture and marketing communication come into play. The BMA project was a great experience that prepared me to take on my summer internship with more confidence and a clear roadmap to guide me.
Best of luck, BMA!