Built to Last: Custom Programs are the Foundation for 21st Century Growth
Designing and implementing a customized education program for a company is no small task. Read about the custom academy McCombs created for Royal Dutch Shell.
By Pam Losefsky
Two years in the making, the Shell program has redefined the concept of custom-built executive education programs and vastly altered the notion of what is possible to achieve within enormous multi-national companies whose people are scattered to the furthest corners of the world.
Shell started with a big idea.
“Quite a number of years ago it became clear that the size and complexity of Shell’s projects had so increased that project management had to be a core skill that the company continually developed in its employees,” says Hans Wierda, now head of SPA. In addition, the scale of Shell’s investment in hydrocarbon development was massive.
“The technologically challenging environments in the frontier areas around the world—where today’s recovery and production often happens—called for huge capital investments,” adds Shell’s John Sharples, learning manager of SPA. “This offered further justification for developing a large-scale education effort—in order to have the highest return possible on Shell’s monetary investments, the company also had to invest in its people.”
But by 2005, the company still had no specific project management programs within its well-established competence development scheme. The company’s search for business and technical expertise on which to build such a program began broadly that year with a list of 120 universities around the world. They quickly narrowed the selection to four: Cranfield School of Business in the U.K., Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands, Queensland University of Technology in Australia and the McCombs School.
Each university partner brings something valuable to the program, and Wierda says that McCombs’ specific strengths are both its program delivery proficiency and the depth of the teaching expertise residing in the McCombs faculty. “We have asked a lot of the faculty,” admits Wierda. “And the McCombs professors have been particularly up to the task.”
The vision for SPA requires a special breed of professor: academics who are passionate about teaching and willing to travel extensively, which requires a lot of stamina and sustained periods of high productivity. Britt Freund is of that breed. A professor of management at McCombs and the university’s academic director for SPA, Freund became entirely dedicated to the program in fall 2007. Between January and June this year, he taught an SPA foundation course with his international colleagues in Rijswijk, Brunei, Nigeria, Houston, Muscat, Sakhalin and London.
But even before the faculty took to the road, they spent months getting up to speed.
