Real Life Simulation on Consulting Life

A simple way to look at this is to see where issues crop up and then thinj of questions based on that

Team related

• Issues with other team members
• Team bonding
• Team staffing issues (under staffed, poor perfomers etc)
• Bad behavior in team (e,g., team not being inclusive)

Client related

• Client unhappy with answer as it differs from their opinion
• Client had different expectations to what you delivered
• Original client left, new client is not happy with what you have worked on

Project related

• Project is getting delayed due to xyz reasons
• Scope of project keeps increasing
• Original project looks very diffferent to what you are currently doing

Hope these help as a guide

Udayan

Hello!

Those are clearly stakeholder management situations! If you want to deep dive on the topic, the "Integrated FIT guide for MBB" has been recently published in PrepLounge´s shop (https://www.preplounge.com/en/shop/tests-2/integrated-fit-guide-for-mbb-34)

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Hey,

The list of such questions can be a mile long :). Instead, you should try and reflect on your own style for the following broad areas and learn to fill the gaps in your approach. These will pretty much cover various scenarios they throw at you.

1. What do you do when things don't go as planned- probably the most important skill and things go wrong more often than not
2. How do you build chemistry with people
3. How do you influence people
4. Whats your leadership and/or team management style
5. How do you deal with too much information/data or too little of it

Hi there,

I love these questions and am seeing them more and more frequently! I just goes to show how adaptable we need to become to prepare for interviews.

Other such questions I've seen are:

1. The client/stakeholder comes into your team room upset about some of your findings. How to you talk to him/her?
2. Your client counterpart has not responded to your emails requesting for critical information that affects your project. The deliverable is now at risk. What do you do?
3. You and your project lead don't see eye-to-eye on a proposed recommendation. How do you resolve this?
4. You have a personal committment for which you would like to take time off, but this is during a busy/tight project. What do you do?

The list is endless, but hope this helps! I highly recommend a coaching session to get you more comfortable in answering these questions that throw you off!

There is no pre-defined right or wrong answer. As always, what matters is your thinking process.

Here is what you need to do in these situations:

1) Assess the situation. Is this a critical mistake impacting the recommendation or a "must-have" analysis?

2) Be aligned with the firm's core values. Bain values being "true north". If there is a mistake impacting the recomendation, you have to "come clean". (if it does not impact the recommendation, you still have to make sure the client gets the corrected analysis).

3) Bring a solution and not just a problem. For example, you will make sure the whole document is reviewed again for issues. You want this to be a one-off problem. For example, you will evaluate the alternatives of doing a different (and quicker) analysis, or the possibility of doing a preliminary analysis (taking e.g. 2 days) before the full 1 week analysis, or reassign someone from a different (less critical analysis) so they can give a hand at the other task and get it done within the alloted time frame.

4) Demonstrate they can trust you to be alone with the client. Clients will many times try to convince ("junior") consultants to do certain analysis. We expect consultants to direct the clients to negotiate with the managers (and if the analysis is out of scope, they will not decide before taking to partners). In other words, you always have to align your suggested course of action with the appropriate authority in your team. This part is critical. While postponing the steering committee is at times acceptable, doing so without consulting with the partner first would be a huge mistake, as they could feel you were mismanaging the client.