Speaker 1: One of the skills that you need to pick up very quickly as a consultant is project management. As a consultant you regularly work in large organizations on topics covering many functions and business units. It is the responsibility of the project lead in the consulting team to set up a governance structure, to set up some project management best practices, to make sure that the whole team stays organized and can deliver on the things that the team needs to deliver on. Hi guys welcome to another coffee break here on my channel Firm Learning. My name is Heinrich and on this channel I want to help you to become successful in the first years of your career. In today's video I'm going to show you in detail how at MBB Consulting Firms the consultants keep the whole project organized, how they organize their shared drives, how they archive and make files available to the whole team. Before we jump into the video I want to take an opportunity to say thank you to all the sponsors of this channel you are really helping me to bring this channel alive this is much appreciated if you want to become a member as well and get access to some great perks sign up via the join button below there's also a link in the video description it would mean the world to me if you become a member of this channel but now let's jump into the topic and how do consultants stay organized consulting firms usually use some type of shared drive service provider. So whether it's Box, Dropbox, OneDrive or anything related there's going to be a platform where all your files for a project are going to stay. So let's start with the overarching folder. How do you name it? And here a beginner mistake that some people do is that they name the folder the same as the client's name. So they give the folder the name of the company that you are currently working for. Here the big risk that you want to avoid is that at some point you're sitting together in a meeting with clients now your screen is shared and you need to pull out a file and now your explorer pops up and now there's a list of all the folders with all your client names that you're currently working for you worked for in the past of course this would be a major breach of confidentiality you do not reveal your client names to other companies so make sure that your client folders for your overarching folder structure are not named in the company way, but give it some kind of a more cryptic name, some more cryptic abbreviation that you use internally, so that if your Explorer window pops up in front of your client, that all your client names are not revealed. So how do you organize and structure the next level of data within your folder? And now I'm going to show you a typical structure, and I used variations of that many times. Of course, the details can always depend a bit on the needs of the individual projects, but if you follow this, usually this will be already a very solid structure. So first of all you will see that on the left of each subfolder you use numbers to keep them in the right order. If you just give them a name then they will usually be ordered alphabetically and then this can be a mess because often of course the best order is not the alphabet but another order that you define. So give numbers and use at least two digits because often you will have more than 10 folders. So use numbers to make sure that the folders always stay in the order that you want them to stay. So what would be typical folders that you'd like to have on this first level? So often I'd like to start with an admin folder. So this is the folder where you put all kinds of admin documents in, so for instance timesheets for your team, maybe some other overviews that everybody needs access to, some travel information, just admin documents where everybody needs to have an easy access on. Next you set up two different types of meeting folders, One for internal meetings and one for client meetings. So in the internal meeting folder, you then archive all the meetings that you have with your partner, with your team, all the internal things. And then the client folder, as the name says, all the interactions where you then have meetings with your clients. Next, you will have a folder for the initial data request. And you're not on every project, but in many projects before you actually start, you will submit a list of data that you ask the client to prepare to make sure that once you're there, once you're working on the client, that you already have at least most of the things you need to enable you to hit the ground running. This is often important base data that the whole team needs access to, so you make sure that you have this neatly collected in this overarching folder. Next you will have a folder each for the key work streams or modules of your project. Usually when you set up a project, you divide it into different substreams, into different modules, into different work streams, and then often you assign each associate to one of these modules. In this specific example, you work for different business units of the clients. So for an energy business unit, for an automotive business unit, and for an advanced industries business unit. These folders will be owned by the associates of your team working on the individual modules. And this is where all the module specific, where all the work stream specific content sits for your project. Next, you will have some folders for the big overarching analysis that you are doing for or some work stream overarching, some module overarching topics that your team is working on. In this specific example, there was an employee survey where apparently the employees of the clients were surveyed. In this folder, you could now organize the survey and where you could then save all the survey results. In addition, there seemed to have happened an overarching benchmark where different functions of the client were benchmarked. And again, then you can set up a folder like this where you organize it. Next, you have a folder with input from your research team. And first of all, notice on all the first number of this folder is a nine. So by giving it a nine, you make sure that it always stays at the bottom of your folder structure. So you do this to keep these a bit less important folders always at the bottom to not mess up the whole order. So in such a research input folder, you can collect all the inputs that you get from your research team. So in many large consulting firms, you will have back offices that help you to do some research such a folder would be the place where you organize all this. Then you might have a folder for old documents. there was already a project going on before you. And now you just take all the data and just put it in one folder so you have it available if you still need it at some point in the future. And then finally, you will often use a folder for final deliverables where you then over time organize all the final documents that you will hand over to the client at the very end of your project. So let's now go one level deeper on the meeting folders because these are indeed some folders that are usually heavily used and it's quite important to have a solid order here. And the first thought is here that every meeting you have should be documented in these folders. So if you wonder, okay, what document did I show two weeks ago when I sat together with this guy, you should always be able to go back in your folder structure and find the very specific document that then you want to pull out. And what I learned and what I can really recommend you is to always then make the folder start with the date when the meeting actually took place. And here again, make sure that you start with the year, then the month, and then the day, this makes sure that if you order them that the meetings will always show up chronologically as they actually took place. And often it makes sense to include what type of meeting it is and often also with whom you had the meeting. So for the internal meeting folder this can for instance be a team kickoff, a team off-site, maybe some meetings or calls you had with partners of yours, as this list of folders can easily grow and can get quite large. At some point then it can often make sense then just to put together all the meetings in one month for a monthly folder. So So at some point you can just drag all the meetings in July into a July folder, all the meetings in August into an August folder. And then you just have all the detailed lists just for the current month. You then might need to more granularly look into the meetings. For the clients it's very similar here. You might typically have draw fixes. You might have steel crows. You might have other client meetings like that. If you're interested to learn more, how such a typical work week in the life of an MBB consultant looks like also check out the video that I will insert here somewhere above to better understand how exactly these meetings will play out during a typical work week. Now, another little best practice tip that I want to give you is now to organize the documents within these specific meeting folders. So if you work together on a team on such a document, often then this folder can easily look like this, right? So a whole lot of versions. And often if you work on such documents like the big Stereo Code documents over some time with your team, the list of documents can easily look like a mess like this. So with lots of different versions, lots of different iterations, and at some point it can get super difficult for somebody looking at it to understand what now really the latest version is. Now, especially if you put yourself into the shoes of, for instance, a partner, he just wants to access the drive, just go into the meeting folder and just quickly pull out the latest version of this Thiergo document that actually was shown, right? Just to look something up. And for him now, if he sees something like this, this is really a nightmare because he doesn't know what now the latest version was. He pretty much needs to always call up the team and ask, hey guys, okay, what is now the latest version? Right, I don't understand anything at all anymore. So here it's a best practice then to have such an old folder, but then you drag all the older versions in and make sure that in the meetings folder, you really only have the latest version of your documents, the latest and then hopefully final version that then everybody knows, okay, this is really the document that we need to look at. Another little best practice is also to clearly label the documents by the status of the release, right? So if you send out a document to the client, then distinctly save it as a VSend or something related. If you then present the document, distinctly save it as a V presented, or then maybe if you make changes afterwards, save it as a V final, but this will enable you if they really want to know, okay, what was the version that I sent out? What was the version that I really presented? What was the version with some last changes that maybe even did after the meeting, that all of this is always clearly labeled, clearly saved. This can really save you some significant headache. If then later somebody asks you about a specific version that you're just not able to understand anymore, which of the version numbers it was, right? So clearly always say that with these labels, you will really thank me in the longterm if you do that. So that's it guys. These are now my best practices. So I believe you should organize and structure your project and what for sure is the best practice in large MBB consulting firms. Hope you found this insightful and if you have any more questions, feel free to leave me a comment below in the comment section. As always, I will do my very best to answer every single one. If you took any value out of this video at all, please destroy the like button for the YouTube algorithm and also subscribe to my channel for even more content. I release weekly videos every Saturday, so subscribe to stay up to date. If you want to see even more from me, follow me on my Instagram, my handle is firmlearning, and I also have a mailing list. If you want to sign up for that, there's a link in the video description. For access to some more great perks that only members get, sign up as a member. There's a join button next to the subscription button and also in the video description. And yes, you will get access to some member-only perks. Thank you for watching and your support. This really means the world to me. Thank you guys, I'm Heinrich from Firm Learning and see you again next Saturday, bye.