BPS 4395.010 · Fall 2026 · Week 2
Slide Overview — Clarity Before Velocity
Week 02
SMARTER Goals, Goal-Aligned Time Management & The Art of Asking Smarter Questions
Great consulting starts by knowing where you are going, protecting the time to get there, and asking the questions others miss.
Week 1 set the expectation that you operate as consultants. Week 2 gives you the disciplines to manage a project no one has fully defined yet.
Where are we going?
A defined outcome the sponsor recognizes as valuable.
Where should our time go?
Deliberate allocation of scarce team capacity.
What do we need to understand?
Questions that improve the problem you are solving.
The biggest capstone risk is not laziness. It is effort spent researching, meeting, and producing deliverables that never advance the client's actual objective.
Convert an ambiguous project objective into a SMARTER goal.
Translate that goal into milestones, priorities, and calendar commitments.
Distinguish activity from progress.
Ask five different types of strategic questions.
Identify weaknesses in your team's questioning repertoire.
Leave a sponsor conversation with greater clarity — not simply more information.
Questions create clarity.
Goals create direction.
Priorities allocate resources.
Time creates execution.
Reflection creates improvement.
Goals, time, and questions are not three mini-lectures. They are one loop.
Start with the discipline you already know — then extend it for consulting work.
What exactly are we trying to accomplish?
What evidence indicates progress or completion?
Can this be done with our resources and constraints?
Why does this outcome matter to the sponsor?
When will it be completed?
What have we learned? Are we still solving the right problem?
What should change based on evidence, sponsor feedback, or new information?
SMARTER has several variants in the management literature. We use Evaluate + Revise because project understanding changes as evidence and sponsor feedback arrive.
“Help us understand the AI funding landscape.”
By our next sponsor checkpoint, identify 20 relevant funding opportunities, evaluate each against agreed eligibility and strategic-fit criteria, and recommend the five warranting deeper investigation.
Ambiguous
Specific
Research
Deliverable
Interesting
Relevant
Eventually
Deadline
Opinion
Evaluation criteria
The goal should tell the team what “done” looks like.
Do not write a paragraph containing seven attributes. Interrogate the goal with seven questions.
Specific
What outcome are we producing?
Measurable
How will we know?
Achievable
What constraints matter?
Relevant
Why does the client care?
Time-bound
By when?
Evaluate
What did we learn?
Revise
What needs to change?
A goal should create decisions, not simply describe aspirations.
Protect the Time
Every level narrows the work until it becomes a scheduled block of time.
Every project has effectively unlimited possible work: more research, more benchmarking, more interviews, more slides. The consultant's job is to keep answering one question — what matters most right now?
Will this materially improve the deliverable?
Is other work waiting on this?
When does this information or decision become necessary?
Each level is only real if it survives to the level below it.
A to-do list is inventory.
Your calendar represents capacity.
Weak
Work on research.
Strong
Identify eight credible sources and capture market size, competitors, and adoption barriers.
Weak
Work on the presentation.
Strong
Draft the three slides explaining our initial hypothesis and its supporting evidence.
Weak
Meet with the sponsor.
Strong
Leave the meeting with agreement on success criteria, decision-maker priorities, and the next two deliverables.
Both categories are necessary. Only one of them will consume the entire project if you let it.
Deep work
Coordination work
Schedule focused analytical blocks. Do not assume the thinking will happen between meetings.
One accountable owner for every meaningful deliverable.
Know who cannot begin until someone else finishes.
Do not make the sponsor deadline your team's first deadline.
Waiting silently is not project management.
Once a week, every team answers seven questions — out loud, together.
Q1
What did we commit to?
Q2
What actually moved?
Q3
What did we learn?
Q4
What is blocked?
Q5
What matters most next?
Q6
What should we stop doing?
Q7
What needs to change?
Evaluate
→ Revise
→ Recommit
Ask Better Questions
AI makes questioning more important, not less. Advantage has shifted from possessing answers toward crafting intelligent questions and prompts — and people default to the questions they are comfortable asking.
Your sponsor may understand the business far better than you do. Your value is often helping them examine the problem differently.
Facts, causes, evidence, assumptions.
Possibilities and challenged constraints.
Moving from thinking to execution.
Converting information into meaning.
Emotions, incentives, concerns, tensions.
Framework: Chevallier, Dalsace & Barsoux, “The Art of Asking Smarter Questions,” Harvard Business Review, May–June 2024. Diagram original.
Leaders and teams over-rely on their preferred questioning style — and neglect entire categories. A highly analytical capstone team gathers enormous amounts of information while never asking:
What does it mean?
What alternative should we consider?
How will people react?
Assess your mix, name your blind spot, and enlist a teammate who covers it.
Investigative questioning usually fails for one reason: people do not go deeply enough.
For five minutes your team may not propose a single solution. Your only job is to generate questions about the client problem.
Then answer this:
Which question would most change how we think about the problem?
Generate three of each
Loaded and closed questions feel prosecutorial. Tone and perceived intent matter as much as wording.
Judger mode
“Why haven't you completed this yet?”
“Don't you think customers would prefer option A?”
Learner mode
“What's getting in the way of completing this?”
“How do you think customers would respond to these options?”
A strong sponsor meeting produces decisions and direction — not merely notes.
SMARTER goals give us direction.
Time management concentrates effort on that direction.
Smarter questions ensure the direction remains correct.
Ask → Set → Execute → Evaluate → Revise
We return to this loop every week — project management, stakeholders, analytics, recommendations, and the final presentation.
1. Ask
What do we need to understand?
2. Align
What outcome actually matters?
3. Prioritize
What matters most now?
4. Execute
What will we complete?
5. Evaluate
What did the evidence tell us?
6. Revise
What should change?
Write one SMARTER project goal.
Define your next three milestones.
Identify this week's three highest-value team outcomes — and put the work on calendars.
Develop ten high-value sponsor questions using multiple question categories.
What are you currently spending time on that does not materially advance your goal?
That is how consultants turn ambiguity into progress.