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Cursus: INFOMICTA
INFOMICTA
ICT advisory
Cursus informatie
CursuscodeINFOMICTA
Studiepunten (EC)7,5
Cursusdoelen
The learning goals for the course are formulated as follows:

* Learning about the theories of advisory, consultancy industry, types of consultancy businesses, steps in consultancy lifecycle, consultancy career and ethics in consultancy.
* Acquiring consultancy skills such as interviewing stakeholders, collecting evidences and analysing them, writing project proposals and advice reports, training others, presenting your results.
* Executing a real project assignment in which newly learned skills and theory are applied.
* Managing interactions with multiple stakeholder expectations; i.e. collaborating to satisfy the needs of real clients, coaches and supervisors
Inhoud
  The advisory discipline is an established industry and employs hundreds of thousands of people. Advisory is best described as “creating value for organisations, through the application of knowledge, techniques and assets, to improve business performance. This is achieved by through the rendering of objective advice and/or the implementation of business solutions” (Markham & O’Mahoney, 2013). Giving advice is not limited to a particular industry and can be found in any industry and on many different topics such as taxes, business strategy, marketing, ICT etc. Logically, the focus of this course is on giving ICT advice but to a variety of industries.
In this course we address ICT advisory from four different perspectives: Descriptive, Practitioner, Critical, and Career perspective. These will be addressed in the lectures of the course and are based on the book that is prescribed for this course. Some of these lectures are delivered by the students themselves, as part of learning how to present and how to provide training. Besides the theory you will be practicing your consultancy skills in the skills workshops. Skills include for example presenting, analysing and writing. Each of the workshops will be provided by a different consultancy company that is based in the Netherlands and concerns a mix of small, medium and large consultancy organisations. Finally, you will practice skills and theory in a project where you have to advise a real client. In this project you will work in teams of three students, where the client that you will be working for is provided by one of the consultancy companies. During the project you will produce a number of intermediate deliverables and the end deliverables are an advice report and a presentation. The deliverables will be graded and are part of your grade for the course.
Several consultancy companies will be participating in this course by providing guest lectures, skills workshops and projects at their clients. At the same time, you also learn more about the different types of consultancies as we have a nice mix of small, medium and large consultancy companies that participate.
 
Registering for this course (DO NOT register yourself through Osiris)
The course is intended solely for MBI students in the business and/or technical consultancy profile. Furthermore, students should have completed at least half a year of their MBI program before starting with this course. Exceptionally, students from other masters of the ICS department can apply but there is no guarantee they will be accepted since their background should match the characteristics of the projects of the current course edition.
Since you will be working for real clients we only expect motivated students to subscribe and therefore we ask you to write a (professional) motivation letter (max 1 A4 including letter head and signature) that should be addressed to the coordinator, Sergio España, by mid April. As an appendix, you should enclose a signed statement that says that you will invest the 210 hours that equal the 7,5 ECTS awarded for the course. Write “[ICTA] Application by your_name” as the email subject and include your student number in the message text or signature. By sending the letter you will be considered as a candidate to take the course. The coordinator, along with other department members, will select a number of students based on (i) the quality of the motivation letter, (ii) the prior MBI courses taken and their grades, (iii) the amount of consultancy projects that have been acquired and how well they match the background of the applicants. You will be informed of the final decision in July.
Later in the course you might be asked to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) in which you declare that you will handle in the best interest of the client and will not disclose any information you get from the client. But, please, consult with the coordinator before signing any NDA since we will want to assess it first (you are expected to act responsibly but we also want to protect you from abusive clauses).

Team formation
We form the teams and assign them to the client projects. Given the nature of this course and to maximise the chances of success, we do not allow you to freely choose your team mates or your project. We need to keep all consultancy companies happy or they will stop working with us, and our way of managing this has yielded excellent results till now. We will inform you of your team members and your project before the course starts.

Find a client
During the course you will be undertaking a consultancy project at a client (i.e. a company or governmental institution). The consultancy companies that participate in this course will provide a number of projects at their clients. But we might need more projects, so you are free to also look out actively for clients yourself. In any case, you are not granted to be allowed to take any project you suggest or find by yourself; the consultancy companies we regularly work with have preference in the course.

Preferred knowledge
It is preferred that students have knowledge of business and ICT as typically covered by the bachelor courses INFOB1ISY, INFOB1OICT and INFOB3SMI.
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