MNGT6275: The Company Project is a special element in the learning process of the Managing the Organisation subject in the MSc: Managing People and Organisations Assignment, US, Ireland

The Company Project is a special element in the learning process of the Managing the Organisation subject in the MSc. It involves research on a company with students working in small groups ( Three (3) or Four (4)students per Group.) Group Company Project Philosophy Clinical learning is an important and necessary part of all advanced education programs that seek to impart and develop professional skills as well as intellectual mastery of a discipline.

Medicine is the most familiar setting for clinical training, but professional education in areas such as architecture, engineering, business, and management also involves the student in the application of abstract knowledge to “practical” exercises in analysis, diagnosis, judgment making, design, and decision-making.

In Business school, the case study has been the chief traditional means of providing the clinical experience. The history of case method education in business studies originated with the foundation of the Harvard Business School. The methodology was borrowed from the Harvard Law School where the case method had been developed to provide students with the professional skills of mastering a legal brief, undertaking the necessary research, and dealing with the legal argument in “real-time” as an advocate – albeit in a classroom context.

In so far as the well-constructed business case study provides a realistic representation of a complex organizational reality, it provides an experience for the business student that is broadly analogous to that of the student of law preparing mastering and defending a brief or that of a medical student at the dissecting table.

In the most advanced professional education, the next stage beyond what might be called the “case stage” is that of practice, under supervision, on a “live” case. At this stage, the educational process has more in common with the final stages of apprenticeship for a craft than with conventional classroom methods.

In medicine, the student enters the clinical phase by being taught at the bedside by an experienced physician. The aspiring lawyer completes an apprenticeship with an able solicitor, or by “devilling” for a barrister. The intending Managing Director will analyze business cases under supervision. The Company project has been designed and continues to be developed in pursuit of such educational aims. The building blocks of the Managing the Organisation, MSc. In Entrepreneurship program provide the concepts and theory relevant to describing and explaining the world of organizations and their management.

The clinical elements of the program- case studies and various exercises- provide the initial practice in aligning theory with practice, followed by the Company Project which moves on to the apprenticeship stage. The project also acts as a feedback mechanism, internal to the program, through which both students and faculty members can observe the extent to which coursework is and can be applied to practice