MBA Capstone

In MGST 615, you will be provided an extensive list of client challenges from a wide variety of sectors and types and stages of organizations. Form a small team of 2-3 students and select the organization and industry that interests your team most. Alternatively, students may choose to work on a business challenge with your current employer or identify an organization that you wish to work with outside of the list provided (these individual projects require instructor approval before the course commences).

Below stats are from past projects (Fall 2016 - Spring 2021).

More than an opportunity to improve your leadership skills and apply your business knowledge, MGST 615 projects help you provide a meaningful impact to the community through helping organizations become more effective and which helps to build a better business ecosystem in Calgary and beyond.

Consider whether you want to work with a for-profit company that is navigating the changing economy or a non-profit organization pursuing a specific cause or a social enterprise reimagining business models to solve social problems.

There are also projects with a sustainability focus looking to create a more sustainable world. If this area interests you, UCalgary in partnership with the Office of Sustainability offers projects that provide you with first-hand experience at solving sustainability-related challenges of a large institution.

Critical thinking, problem solving, professionalism, teamwork/collaboration, and oral/written communication are just some of the skills you can expect to utilize in this course. An individual self-reflection assignment at the end allows you to 1) reflect on how your current knowledge and skills affected the project outcomes and what your key learnings were and 2) an analysis of the project – what worked, what didn't and what you would do differently.

The benefits of this course include new connections in the community, the chance to explore a new industry, potential job opportunities and pride in making an impact to the partner organization. 

Colouring it Forward is an Indigenous social enterprise that produces colouring books, journals, calendars and other products with Indigenous artists and elders to help people reconnect with the cultures.  Diana Frost is Founder and CEO, an engineer by trade, working on community improvement projects all over the world. As an Algonquin Metis and an artist and a musician, Diana was inspired to start her own business and give back to the community by making small donations from each product sold to different cultural revitalization projects. Her business challenge as a solopreneur working with several contractors was the heavy workload and inefficiencies she dealt with. Diana challenged her MGST 615 student-team to help her find a business model and provide recommendations to help her improve her financial and operational sustainability while still continuing to give back to the community.

Elena Rhodes took the course in spring 2021.  Her team worked with the Federation of Calgary Communities to develop a reliable framework to help identify, evaluate and rank possible revenue-generating service lines.

“In addition to applying and refining our project management experience, this project provided a great opportunity to apply concepts from different MBA courses we collectively took. It was a very tangible lesson on the value of integrating many academic ideas and models into the context of the client’s needs.  They informed our approach to this consulting project and were invaluable in the development of our product.  The self-reflection during this course made me realize how the business knowledge developed during my MBA studies could have informed and improved my previous consulting work.  Whether or not I return to consulting, my business knowledge has been invaluable for my current work in educational administration.”

Devin Lacey took MGST 615 in spring 2020. He and his team were matched with GLJ Ltd. Their project was to create a market entry strategy for expansion of the company’s consulting services into the Renewable Energy sector. The team filled an important role for the company as this was a critical area needed to advance their business but resources were lacking in this area. GLJ was thoroughly impressed with the team’s work. After the course, GLJ took advantage of another Haskayne program the Mitacs Business Strategy Internship (MBSI) to hire Devin for a summer internship. Devin went on to graduate from the MBA program in November 2020 and was offered a full-time position with GLJ as a senior business analyst. GLJ continues to participate in the Haskayne MBA Capstone course by submitting new projects and challenges for future student teams.

“One of the key skills I took away from the project was the ability to take large amounts of data and compile it into concise and actionable recommendations for the client.  There is a plethora of secondary data available on the energy sector and clean energy transition – much of it is redundant, non-standardized, untimely or from non-reputable sources.  The comprehensive research process we executed for this project delivery covered a full and in-depth assessment of the global energy landscape so we really learned how to filter through vast amounts of data and more importantly, managed to condense this data into a relatively concise presentation to our client so that they may draw conclusions from our findings”.