University of Michigan Project Management & Consulting Class

Amy Cell teaches a course through the U-M College of Engineering Center for Entrepreneurship called “Project Management and Consulting”. This 14-week course, open to undergraduate seniors and graduate students, assigns small groups of 3-5 students to local business projects. There is no cost for non-profits and startups to provide projects for this class.

An ideal project:

• Is meaningful to the sponsor.
• Is not “free help” to the sponsor, nor is it a traditional internship or job shadowing. It should provide a realistic consulting experience, giving students a relatively high degree of autonomy.
• Accommodates a working time frame of October-November or February-March.
• Includes around 100 hours of work in total.
• Requires students to nail down a scope and deliverables at the onset of the project.
• Includes a variety of tasks that need to be understood and organized.
• Contains multiple types of elements/deliverables/milestones.
• Could require students to do research, brainstorming, development of options, or other tasks.
• Requires students to communicate their findings.

Projects should provide a “champion” that can spend around 10-20 hours over the course of the project with the students. This champion would help set up the scope of the project, introduce the team to other people, answer questions and provide some short feedback to Amy Cell about student performance. The champion will need to be available for a 2 hour planning meeting with the students in late September/October or January/February.

Recruiting for projects takes place around July for the fall semester and November for the winter semester. Projects are accepted on a rolling basis. If you are interested in submitting a project, contact Amy Cell for more information at amycell@umich.edu.

Kristine Nash-Wong

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