OP Team Project

The OP Team Project

Organizational Processes (OP) is a core course for all 450+ first-year MIT Sloan MBA students. Because success in business often comes down to people, students in OP learn to look at organizations through three people-oriented “lenses” —structural design (division of labor, goals, incentives), political (resources, power, status), and cultural (beliefs, values, identities).  Our goal is to develop effective leaders and managers who use all three lenses to analyze business situations and craft implementation plans.

A critical part of the course is analyzing a live case study with a real company.  Over the semester, each team of six high-performing students analyzes a company’s strategic change initiative by talking to stakeholders and mapping the organization’s structure, politics, and culture.

What is a project?

OP Team Projects focus on organizations that are currently implementing (or have recently completed) a strategic change initiative.  OP Team Projects are not consulting projects and they are not internships. At their core, these opportunities provide students with an experiential learning opportunity; a chance to put into practice what they’ve learned in their professional lives and through their OP coursework. The hosts gain valuable insights, actionable recommendations, and connections with MIT Sloan MBA students.

Past team projects include:

• Strategic reorientations (post-merger integration; organizational restructuring; pivoting to a new revenue model)
• Introductions of new technology (new platform implementation; rationalizing organization-wide technology)
• Managing rapid growth (building out the team for new product launch; restructuring for geographical expansion; establishing new HR processes)
• Improving multi-disciplinary collaboration (improving the ability for employees from different parts of the business—sales, operations, IT— to work together effectively; implementing Agile transformation)

What is the team’s timing?

• September: Identify host organization and strategic change initiative; sign Letter of Agreement plus MIT NDA, if an NDA is required by the host organization
• October: Conduct 10 interviews
• November: Analyze interview data
• December: Summarize conclusions

What’s in it for you?

OP Team Project hosts are integral members of a two-way educational journey; students gain real-world experiences while hosts gain sophisticated insights, custom-tailored to their unique business challenges. By guiding students, hosts receive access to motivated, hard-working future leaders eager to make their mark on your company and the world.

Each OP Team will deliver an executive summary presentation and briefing to their host organization.  This will combine content from the presentation made to their first-year communication class and their fifteen-page paper written for the OP faculty.  

What is required of a host?

• Identify a strategic change initiative to analyze
• Provide project sponsorship at the executive level
• Facilitate approximately ten (10) 30-minute interviews
• Select a Point of Contact who is invested in the project and can:
  • Meet with the students upfront to describe the initiative
  • Facilitate introductions to key internal stakeholders
  • Provide relevant data, documents, and information

To accomplish this, the best matches are organizations (or departments) with over twenty (20) employees who can conduct the majority of interviews in English.  Students teams will consider any time zone differences.

Anything else?

To streamline the process, below please find

1. The standard MIT NDA, for use by host companies that require an NDA.  We take your data very seriously, and we carefully train students how to protect your information.  Please note that, with over 60-team OP team projects annually, we cannot negotiate individual company NDAs. Instead, we commit to a standard set of compliance protocols for all teams, as summarized in the “MIT NDA.”
2. A sample Letter of Agreement that the team will co-craft in collaboration with hosts to ensure that the team understands the host's key questions.

If you have any questions, please email the MBA student who has contacted you or one of our OP team members:

For Summer 2023, students Shirin Chen and Anton Ulyanov

• Shirin Chen, schen22@mit.edu 
• Anton Ulyanov, aulyanov@mit.edu

For Fall 2023, TAs Karen Ejiofor and Pep Soetanto

• Karen Ejiofor, kejiofor@mit.edu
• Pep Soetanto, desi9@mit.edu