Live project - Operations Strategy and Management Control

The Master program in Business and Management (MBM) attracts students with various backgrounds from all over the world. It assumes a business development perspective, which means that it focuses on developing a firm’s competitive position, its processes, people and products, its networks and resources. Business development mixes theory and practice and includes areas such as market, strategy and leadership to be managed in order to succeed.

What the project involves

The live projects will run parallel with the MBM courses Operations Strategy (7.5 ECTS) and Management Accounting & Control (7.5 ECTS). The live project is conducted and assessed as a group work (5 - 6 students). Together with your organization, the students define an operations and management control - related live project topic that they will work on from late October to mid-December.

The empirical material that students use for the analysis will consist of interviews with different representatives in your organization. Those interviews can be complemented by various types of additional empirical material such as company presentations, internal documents, or publicly available information gathered via the organization's website, social media, annual or sustainability reports, or media coverage.

Student groups will work on the project for about 1 day per week for about 7 weeks and runs in parallel with lectures and seminars.

What makes these projects valuable

Students will apply a relevant management control model alongside frameworks and concepts from operations strategy to analyze a real issue or challenge within your organization and provide actionable recommendations. The results are presented to the organization at the end of the period.

Each project will be handled by one group working on one specific problem or question in one company, drawing on insights from both courses. We aim for a fully integrated approach that places the company’s challenge and the students’ solution at the core. The frameworks from both courses support a structured journey from problem to solution. Depending on the case, some projects may lean more toward operations strategy or management control—and that’s perfectly fine.

Your organization gets:

A relevant analysis that can add new perspectives to business
A detailed final presentation and report with strategic recommendations
A low-effort, high-reward way to address a live challenge in your business
A close contact with the school’s top students - a broad and proven recruitment base

What we are looking for

Many projects that work well with the courses usually start with a real problem or challenge that your company is facing, internally or externally. One way to go about it is to start with an operational challenge and then add a management control dimension to it.

Below you will find examples of projects from different industries that overlap both courses.

Analyze the supply chain operations and conduct a cost analysis for a manufacturing company to optimize the supply chain, enhance cost-efficiency, and improve overall operational performance.
Analyze donor acquisition strategies and assess fundraising operations and its efficiency for an NGO to enhance donor engagement, optimize resource allocation, and maximize fundraising effectiveness.
Analyze the customer experience journey and conduct a service optimization analysis for a telecom company to enhance customer satisfaction, improve service quality, and drive customer loyalty.

Note that these are examples should give you some inspiration of what a project might contain. Please contact Andreas Dahlberg (contact info below) if you like to see more examples.

What we ask from you

A defined challenge:
Provide a challenge for students to address. However, the ultimate research focus is for students to define in line with the course materials.
Collaboration & feedback:
Assign a company contact to provide data, contacts within the company, and some guidance.
Openness to new ideas:
Be open to the fresh, innovative solutions our students will bring to your organization. Please also know that, despite the clear benefits, this is first and foremost an educational project for students.
No NDA:
SSE students cannot sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) for this project for practical and pedagogical reasons. In certain cases, NDAs nevertheless need to be put in place. For these cases, we have prepared an NDA that is appropriate for an academic setting. Please note that the school, not the students, would be the signatory party. We ask that you let us know as soon as possible if your participation is likely to require the use of an NDA.

We also ask for a one-page brief outlining your organization and an initial challenge or area of interest, as well as contact information. This material will be used by the students as an initial introduction to the organization and challenge at hand.

Do you want to host a live project?

Bring your questions or project suggestions to us by September 20:

Email: andreas.dahlberg@hhs.se
Phone: +46(0) 73 022 35 27