The virtual company of Curriculum Discipuli Cura

--------Focus on expanding value of resource, products and market via virtual community cooperation for consulting company

1. Two party introduction

1.1 One party -Consulting Company –CRA international

CRAi (compliance resource associates international) range around 30^th in the field of consulting industry in the world and they have subsidiary at Hong Kong.  They provide a range of conformity assessment and compliance related services targeted at creating practical and workable solutions in developing broad based compliance systems for companies and enterprises for the possibility to be part of the CRAi group, via tailored business ventures*1.

With the development of every industry’s globalization, consulting industry is confronted with more challenges, most focusing on: (1) hard to acquire right set of talent, (2) cost efficiency operations to match the client’s requirements and (3) limitations of consulting service outsourcing.*2 These challenges are particular obvious for small and medium consulting companies including CRAi. The virtual community enables the consulting company to operate more efficient into finding the right talents for the right positions. Additionally, the forum forms a platform to discuss and solve complex industry problems in an out-of-the-box and extremely low cost way.

1.2 Another party – Students from City University of Hong Kong

University students from City University of Hong Kong in Business, Management or any other related with the field of consulting industry. They are studying in the degree of Bachelor, or Master or PhD trajectory. They are interested in consulting industry, or want to share their academic knowledge about the field of consulting with others, or want to connect theory and practices with real-life consulting examples, or look for a full-time or part-time job in the field of consulting industry.

2. Virtual company

2.1 Introduction of virtual collaboration company - Curriculum Discipuli Cura (Career Student Management)  

Curriculum Discipuli Cura is Latin which means Career- student management . Career means long term development. Developing student’s career and CRAi’s career is our virtual company mission. The virtual company is an innovative platform where the management consulting business and students become allies in solving issues in the industry. Additionally, it offers significant opportunities for talents to show their managerial knowledge and for the business to identify the right personnel prospects for their business.

2.2 The platform of the virtual company –www.CDC.com

The website of www.CDC.com most focuses on 4 functions, including talent pool, forum, virtual team project cooperation, and training.

Talent pool

Students input their personal profile including the video covering personal strengths, and do job related test and assessment. Virtual company does basic evaluation on students, and approves them to become online membership. This is basic talent pool for virtual company. Then students can become different grade online membership from normal member to Bronze VIP member, Silver VIP member, Gold VIP member, White Gold VIP member, Diamond VIP member step by step basing on the quantities and quality of the ideas they present online, which was tracked and assessed by automatic assessment system of the website.

Forum: projects conversation and ideas collection

CRAi sort out real cases and put them in different groups in the website of www.CDC.com. The groups are classified by categories of consulting topics . They include management system, organization transferring, marketing & supplier evaluation, products certification, training of staff, suppliers, contractors, etc. Students can speak out freely based on the case samples, employees or experts from CRAi or the virtual company can be as a conductor to culture excellent competition in this virtual community. Ideas should be assessed and done feedback timely in the website in order CRAi can collect useful ideas from the crowd search. If CRAi think the idea is very useful and should be deepened more, CRAi can communicate with the individual students separately, thus the student can get payment and work as a virtual teammate for CRAi.

Virtual team project cooperation

There are many forms material cooperation between the two parties. The qualified students will be interviewed from internet by HR employees or experts of CRAi after they become Gold VIP member. After interview, they can become real or online employees of CRAi or employees of the virtual company working as part-time or full-time. For the real employees of CRAi, after students graduate, they can work in CRAi directly. Moreover, basing on student’s strength, source place, etc, CRAi can do real projects cooperation with students, which decrease CRAi fixed charge on full time employees and traffic cost and allowance. Furthermore, with virtual company expansion, it needs more employees to work in internet, such as maintaining website, conductors of ideas sharing, summary and assessment etc. Usually working in internet, students can work as part-time or full-time, and without any place and time limitation.

Training

The virtual company offers practical and feasible training programs in the website. The training programs include instance analysis, industry analysis, consultant certification training, etc. which aims to facilitate students to become professional consultants.

2.3 Two examples illustrate the virtual company’s operation and value added

‘’John is a motivated and well-performing student in Business. He is currently in his final Master year and he dreams of getting a challenging job in Management Consulting. He has much knowledge about his field. He discovers the website www.CDC.com and starts to participate on it. He actually discovers that many of the topics he is currently discussing in his classes are applicable to the cases that are available on the website. Motivated and encouraged he starts to participate by discussing online about the cases and coming up with solutions for the complex problems. By now, he already starts to enjoy his studies more because he can use his learned theoretical knowledge in practice, so it now has a purpose on the short term instead of only the long term. Sarah is a talent recruiter for CRAi a world famous management consulting company. She regularly posts relevant cases on the platform for students to look into. This way she can help several business units with finding innovative solutions to complex problems by crowd sourcing. Additionally, she keeps track of different potentials that are performing very well on the platform. With a position coming vacant in September she starts to look for several possible candidates. One of these candidates is John. John has a profile on Curriculum Discipuli Cura with his updated résumé and contact details. Sarah pro-actively contacts John to check for his interest in applying for the vacancy that is about the pop-up and he accepts. Eventually, John proves himself throughout the remaining part of the selection procedure and gets the position. It is win-win situation for both parties on multiple levels.

Another example, CRAi has a business project with a company. It will offer export assistance for this company. CRAi give project cooperation chances to some students who are specialize in marketing, business and are familiar with the regulations or market distribution about related products in their host countries. The employees of CRAi and the qualified students form a virtual team to work together for the real business project. The have meetings and discuss in the website or other virtual ways such as emails,

skype etc. Then students can do market investigation and study when they visit their host country. During the virtual cooperation, students not only can put their theory in practice, and learn real work experience about virtual collaboration, negotiation, investigation, analysis etc, but also can get payment during their vacation. CRAi not only can get many part-time employees to acquire, package& share, storage, transfer, and apply data, information and knowledge for minimum cost*3, but also can speed implementation on the real project. It is also a win-win situation for both parties on multiple levels.

3. How the virtual collaboration adds and expands value:

3.1 Internet adds value

The form of virtual collaboration between City U and CRAi most focuses on the internet platform. Basing on M. Zeng and W. Reinartz’s chart of internet activities that add value, (seeing figure 1)*4, we can see how the internet adds value. First for the search aspect, for both of two parties can get faster speed information gathering; CRAi can access greater breadth of information and decrease cost of search; the talents of City U is easy to be found by CRAi. Secondly, as for the evaluation, CRAi can compare all the ideas sharing and facilitates comparative ideas adoption, and both of the parties can catalogues customer evaluations of performance. The third is problem solving. Using internet can handle unique problems individually and provide immediate answers for both of parties. Fourthly, the platform of internet can lower overall transaction cost, permit more rapid sales and more reliable transactions for both of parties.

Figure1

The virtual collaboration leverages the internet capabilities, such as linking sources of supply (ideas, products and services) and handle with suppliers(students) more efficiently; conducting business without time limited and expense of physical travel; increasing level of access to local cultures and market conditions; addressing both cost reduction and local adaptation issues; facilitating collaboration between remote locations.

3.2 The values are added and expanded by two virtual collaboration

Generally, Virtual collaboration offers the CRAi to:

-          Crowd search for solutions to complex real-time and real-life problems in the current industries. By calling out for motivated students to tackle these problems they can use a wider source of information to solve the problems.

-          Crowd search facilitates out-of-the-box thinking for companies. It will be good for consulting companies repositioning on forecasting potential problems and preventing problems for the potential customers. This broadens their scope instead of only focusing on helping to resolve problems for their current customers. This enables them to expand their customers and market substantially.

-          Discover and follow talents in at an early stage and form a virtual talent pool. This forms an opportunity for the management consulting industry by finding the best of the best and selecting candidates for starting position early. The current selection procedure starts with a pool of thousands of applicants.

On another hand, the virtual collaboration offers the possibility for City University and its student in Business, Management or any other related field of consulting industry:

-          Form a cost-effective opportunity to create extra value for the City U, facilitating its students’ better job opportunity, and providing quality education by connecting theory and practice.

-          Develop students personally by applying the learned theory in their universities to real-time and real life problems in the current business landscape. This nourishes their practical development significantly.

-          They can position themselves towards the management consulting companies that host the platform to show their potential. This increases the fare change of being selected for positions by showing your skills on the platform.

-          Create a short term advantage for students. Their knowledge can be applied right away.

-          Offer opportunities for students to work in the field of consulting part-time or full-time after graduation with a virtual-team based online communication and management.

3.2 Three vectors and three stages for the virtual collaboration:

Harmony among three vectors –customer interaction, asset sourcing, and knowledge leverage (see figure2) – and a strong IT platform from the strategy and structure of a business model for the knowledge economy.(N. Venkatraman & John C. Henderson)*5 

  

                                                                           Figure2

Customer interaction (virtual encounter): Basing on the perspective of our party –CRAi, students and City U are our economical and enormous potential suppliers of the virtual collaboration. The platform of the website allows students to remotely share their ideas, actively participate in dynamic customization, and create mutually reinforcing customer communities.

The asset configuration vector (virtual sourcing) focuses on firms’ requirements to be virtually integrated in business network, in sharp contrast to the vertically integrated model of the industrial economy. The virtual collaboration using the internet transaction can source modules to students, do interdependence process with students, and assemble and coordinate the resource both from two parties to deliver value to CRAi’s customers.

The knowledge leverage vector (virtual expertise) is concerned with the opportunities for leveraging diverse sources of expertise within and across organizational boundaries. The virtual collaboration perfects collection channels for knowledge and expertise using for CRAi, including work-unit expertise, corporate asset and professional community expertise. Students from different culture, country and academic background mostly contributes to professional community expertise and knowledge. The knowledge and expertise drive value creation and organizational effectiveness for CRAi.

4. Management of Virtual Company- Curriculum Discipuli Cura

4.1 Investors negotiation

Investing on Virtual Company- Curriculum Discipuli Cura

Curriculum Discipuli Cura will be evenly shared at 50% by CRAi (compliance resource associates international) and 50% by City University of Hong Kong (CityU). Both organization will not have any leading shares or priorities in making decision. Instead, it's the Business Idea that has the highest priority that makes the final decisions.

Value added to CRAi is we can have a new organization that can help us to enter a new and gold driven market, Greater China - which includes Hong Kong and many China cities, such as Shanghai.
Hong Kong will be the first step as Hong Kong has all the infrastructure such as Data Network, which is open and free from obstacles.

Why City University of Hong Kong (CityU)?
City University of Hong Kong is one of the leading universities in Hong Kong at the field of Managements.
Student come from all over the World, especially Mainland China. Who can give us many information that we need on this challenging market.

Value added for City University of Hong Kong, students who work for leading consultants like us, CRAi.
Can easily draw attention of future employers that Graduates are well worthy such as a Brand Name. This in turn can increase credibility of  Graduates and increase the percentage of employment rate.What is more, we have a new program of  Talent pool, which we will help employers to find the right employee to fit their needs. And our practical Training will give them glory to shine compared to their competitors.

4.2 The challenge of virtual company management

Before making the decision to go Virtual, CRAi did an research and found out that these are are top five challenges for organization. And we have decided to have our own Virtual Company- Curriculum Discipuli Cura. We will provide our solution to solve these problems.

Time zones (78%)
Time required to make decisions (74%)
Different accents (69%)
Cultural differences (59%)
Language (51%)

The top five challenges faced during virtual team meetings were:
Insufficient time to build relationships (79%)
Speed of decision making (73%)
Colleagues who do not participate (71%)
Different leadership styles (69%)
The method of decision making (55%) *9

Below is a good example of Australian English, compared to US English - the most common type of English
There are many similar in words but have very different meanings. We know them by heart and don't want our employees to get into these language traps. Which are inclusive of  Language, Cultural differences, Different accents.

*10

(Solution)

The RAMP Model*11

R-Relationships

How could we can we build a relationship with our meeting face-to-face? Even distance relationship between couples starts by meeting at least once.
We plan to have at lest twice a year for leader and member to meet an build up their relationships  

A-Accountability

We will provide employee clear, clarified expectations of deliverable so that they can know what their role and responsibilities

M-Motivation 

We will provide team branding, individual accomplishments schemes, rewarding schemes on both individual and team achievements. Employees are also involved in team members' decisions that will affect them.

P-Process and purpose

We will provide employee goals, roles and processes from the earliest stages of project development.
We will also state and provide them the clear purpose of the reason why that task-related to the team processes can help to improve team performance to achieve our overall organizational goals.

And finally to tackle the Time zones, and Time required to make decisions.
We have decided to have meeting at noon, when both parties can have to discuss during their office hours.
Documents needs to be ready the day earlier before meetings to shorten Time required to make decisions.

4.3 Collective creativity

Creative involves a large number of people from different disciplines working effectively together to solve a great many problems*6. But for the virtual collaboration between students and CRAi, students share their own ideas for solving problem just basing on their intrinsic demand which are to put their learning theories into practice and to learn more knowledge, capability and skills for their future use, therefore the virtual work environment is freely but not effectively, which is not easy for CRAi to collect real creative ideas. If the virtual company can conduct favorable competitive virtual environment for students’ competition and offer certain extrinsic reward system for the students to encourage them to share their ideas effectively.

Furthermore, too much data, information and knowledge can be crippling and knowledge sources can be misleading*7 because students come from diverse culture and they more focus on academic field but not practice field. Therefore, if the virtual company offers practical and feasible training in the website, it will not only motivate students to produce more creative ideas because training belong extrinsic reward for students, but also can decrease misleading or useless ideas and contribute to collect good ideas which are really good for CRAi current and future use.

Systematizing the process of innovation is good way for CRAi to collect creativity. The best innovators aren’t long geniuses. They’re people who can take an idea that’s obvious in one context and apply it in not-so-obvious ways to a different context. The best companies have learned to systematize that process. *8 Students ideas are just raw materials for one new idea, RCAi can collect ideas, keep good ideas alive, image new uses for students’ ideas, and put promising concepts to the test. The most important thing is that RCAi should do feedback timely for the real good ideas, which can motivate students deepen the ideas and create new good ideas farther.

5. Conclusion

The decision of Curriculum Discipuli Cura to be an Virtual Company is a Win - Win negotiation
Value added are generated to both parties CRAi and CityU. Either party will not be the only winner.

To be successful in a virtual organization like Curriculum Discipuli Cura. We need to be very selective on Team member selection, CityU will be a good institution that can provide the suitable talents required.

We need to find suitable Virtual team leaders, who is  Language, Cultural differences, Different accents.

Indeed the Leaders has the suitable Leadership style that can provide as a role model to fellow members.

We as the organization provide clear process that we can explain the purpose clearly to employees.

Last but not least, management supports on Resources. Although we don't need to have a registered address to start up a Virtual Company. The start up investments is still high on the technologies to accommodate virtual collaboration. But we can be certain that this investment will generally increase in terms on Return on Investment.

Reference:

1.  CRAi introduction, from the website: http://www.cra-international.com.au/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1

2.       Consulting industry, problem, solutions, and opportunities, from the website: http://www.slideshare.net/Consultgenie/consulting-industry-in-problems-solutions-opportunities-1748225

3.       Bartlett, C. A. and Beamish, P.w.(2011) Transnational Management: Text, Case and Readings in Cross-Border Management, Sixth edition, McGraw Hill-Irwin: New York: NY.

4.       Adapted from M.Zeng and W.reinartz, “Beyond online search: the Road to Profitability. ”California Management Review, Winter2003,pp.107-30; and C.B. stabell and O.D. Fjeldstad, “ Configuring value for competitive advantage; On Chains, Shops, and Networks” Strategic management Journal19(1998) pp.413-37

5.       N.Venkatrama and John C. Henderson , Real Strategies for Virtual Organizing, Sloan Management Review, Fall 1998

6.       Ed Catmull, How Pixar Fosters Collective creativity

7.       Frank’ lecture, 2.25,2013, Knowledge management in a learning organization

8.       Andrew Hardgadon and Robert I. Sutton, Building Innovation Factory, from Harvard Business Review, May-June 2000,
9.       The Challenges of Working in Virtual Teams, 2012 Virtual Teams Survey Report
10.     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuRrp83jCuQ  
11.    Managing Virtual World BY GOLNAZ SADRI AND JOHN CONDIA