All 2 entries tagged Matt Lucas

Building Effective Client Proposals

by Matthew Lucas

Effective pitching to business leaders is a critical skill, particularly for those involved (or aspire to be involved) in consultancy and business transformation. Drawing from extensive experience at IBM and teaching at Warwick Business School, Matthew Lucas has produced a new article that outlines key strategies for students to craft and deliver successful business proposals. The process is broken down into four main stages; research, formulation, development, and delivery:

1. Research: The research phase is crucial for grounding the proposal in a thorough understanding of the client's problem and business context. The article recommends starting by investigating the client and their requirements and discusses the various information sources such as company reports, external messaging, and competitive analysis to gain a comprehensive view.
2. Formulation: In this stage, ideas are developed that address the client's requirements, often utilising a process like Design Thinking. The article recommends a brainstorming session to generate a wide range of ideas, which are then narrowed down in to one or two feasible and high-impact concepts. It describes the key considerations when refining your ideas, including the benefits for various stakeholders, success criteria (using SMART targets), associated costs, potential risks, alternative solutions, ethical considerations, and implementation guidance.
3. Development: The development phase involves creating a presentation or other documentation to convey your ideas effectively. The article recommends a presentation structure that’s designed to be clear and comprehensive, and with the best chance of success.
4. Delivery: Effective delivery of the material is as important as the content itself. This section gives recommendations on how to prepare for and pitch any client presentation, with techniques to control nerves and mitigate the chances of things going wrong on the day.

By following the strategies in this article, students can enhance their ability to influence and persuade business leaders effectively.

Abigail Ball : 28 May 2024 09:00 |  Tags: Communication Consulting Matt Lucas Presentation Skills |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Building knowledge on the pedagogy of using generative AI in the classroom and in assessments

By Matt Lucas and Isabel Fischer (WBS)

Matt Lucas is a Senior Product Manager at IBM, and Isabel Fischer is an Associate Professor (Reader) of Information Systems at WBS (Warwick Business School). Isabel also co-convenes an IATL (Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning) module. This blog represents their own opinions and not those of their employers.

After two terms of including generative AI (GenAI) in my teaching and for assessments I am still building my knowledge and understanding around the pedagogy of using GenAI. Students seem to like the entertainment of playing around with music and art (e.g. DALL.E 2 and midjourney), creating images and also memes, with all of these being user-friendly for big screens and also for huddling around one laptop as part of teamwork. Text-outputs seems less intuitive for ‘collective use’: There does not seem to be yet an app available that allows for hands-on collaborative refinement of prompts (e.g. similar to students working on the same Google doc). And displaying a string of words on a shared screen clearly does not have the same entertainment value for students as ‘customers and consumers’.

In addition to a lack of entertainment value I also found that students seem to actually appreciate word-based GenAI (e.g. ChatGPT and Bard) as ‘their secret tool’ at their disposal and for them to use. They appear to appreciate it, if lecturers show them the exact prompts that they can copy that allows them to make the most of ‘their secret tool’. They seem less keen about having to be transparent about using the tool themselves and having to justify and critically reflect on usage. It not only means additional work, more importantly, they dislike the thought of the tool’s hidden power being exposed. They appear even less keen for lecturers to use GenAI for the lesson preparation and to be transparent about it because otherwise, what is the ‘perceived added value’ of attending the lecture if they could have just reviewed GenAI?

With this in mind, what are the skills that students can learn from using GenAI in the classroom and in assessments?

In the attached blog Matt Lucas and I suggest that by including innovative aspects into assessments, students can learn and practise four skills that are relevant for their future careers in a world disrupted by AI:

1. Cognitive flexibility, abstraction and simplification

2. Curiosity, including prompt engineering

3. Personalisation, reflection and empathising to adapt to different audiences

4. Critical evaluation of AI

For each of the four skills we explain in the attached blog the relevance for student learning with some illustrative examples, before outlining how we have incorporated these four skills into students’ assessments in the recent term.

Abigail Ball : 12 Jun 2023 09:00 |  Tags: Assessment Isabel Fischer Matt Lucas Teaching |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem