We're over half way through in our last semester, and I can't believe there are only 7 more weeks of this MBA journey. My team is really close to completing our Capstone Deliverable, and I thought I might share some insight from our current perspective.
1. Consider a Capstone team of atleast 4 members.
While 2 or 3 may do, you still have assignments for class in which you break into your groups for presentations and paper writing. Smaller teams mean more work.
2. Consider a Capstone project/deliverable that can flow with outcomes expected in the final semester. A student from the current 6th semester should be able to provide you a syllabus. Noting, items may change, it would help to determine what work you will already be expected to do, and see if you can match that up with your outcome or deliverables.
3. Frontload your semester. Currently the final semester is a 15 week Innvovation and Entrepreneurship class with 10 weeks of "capstone" sandwiching a 5 week leadership class. While the Leadership class does have a paper due pretty much every week, it's important to continue working on your capstone project throughout this time. Its important to manage 3 classes at once, even though only two are currently meeting. We scheduled calls with our company every other week. On call off weeks, we put together documents with their added input and documents for them to review for our next call. This next week should be our final call, already, and we will be finalizing our Deliverable 3, which for our group is the third section break out of the Program Strategic Plan that we are creating. All that will be left is compiling the paper from our three sections, and finalizing a presentation.
4. Stay on top of it. Our group has an established meeting time on Thursday evenings from 6-7:30, and we utilize WebEx to do something similar to a skype call while we can switch to eachother's screen and show documents and agendas. We also utilize Google Docs for a timeline I set up at the beginning of the semester where I combined the syllabi togther for each class. Column headings are the weeks of classes, and rows list each class, project mile markers, and each team member's names so they can update their schedules of when they are available or out of town.
5. Don't get bogged down. Currently the Capstone project is only a 2 hr credit. I know this will be changing in the upcoming semesters to a 4 hour credit (sorry future cohorts), but for now, keep this realiziation. For some companies, this really means they need more than what you can offer. Keep your scope narrow, so you can do well with what you take on.
If you have any other questions, or are a student working on your Capstone and have additional ideas, please feel free to comment and add on!
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