Custom Program — Scoping the NovaBank Engagement at CBE-Adriatic

A four-round, advanced executive-education and professional-services simulation set inside the Centre for Business Excellence (CBE-Adriatic), the exec-ed arm of a leading Central-European business school in Ljubljana, Slovenia. In 2025 the centre ran 71 programs for 38 corporate clients, generating EUR 6.8M at a 34% blended contribution margin, drawing on a pool of 45 faculty and practitioners whose senior time is its scarcest resource. On 3 February 2026 NovaBank Group issues an RFP for a 12-month leadership-and-digital-transformation program for 90 managers, with a possible multi-year extension and an indicated budget of EUR 540,000. As Centre Director you must scope a proposal that wins the client and protects both margin and faculty capacity. The catch: NovaBank's full wish list — fully residential delivery, 1:1 executive coaching, a digital-learning platform, and embedded transformation consulting — costs out at a 19% margin (four points below the board's hard 30% floor) and consumes 34 star-faculty days when your two most-requested professors have only 18 and 22 days left, with three other live deals and a loyal EUR 180,000 repeat sustainability client competing for the same calendar. Round 1: read the brief and separate NovaBank's underlying objective (build digital-ready leaders) from its specified solution, costing the wished-for bundle and mapping the capacity conflict. Round 2: the core decision — choose delivery format (residential / blended / largely online), faculty mix (star-professor vs adjunct and external-consultant days), and consulting add-on depth, assembling an architecture that clears the 30% margin floor, fits available star-faculty days, and still delivers a credible, client-fit solution priced against the EUR 540,000 budget. Round 3: resolve a live squeeze as procurement pushes for more star face-time at the same budget and the repeat client confirms it needs its program on overlapping dates — substitute faculty, trade concessions for term or volume, and make the call on the repeat-client conflict weighing client lifetime value. Round 4: pitch the engagement to NovaBank's L&D sponsor, selling impact over activity and forecasting the four KPIs. The math rewards solution design over order-taking, profitability engineered in the design phase, disciplined faculty-capacity management, paid-for concessions, and outcome-based positioning — and punishes the classic errors: order-taking that breaches the margin floor, over-correcting on margin by stripping the premium the client is paying for, capacity blindness, free concessions, and selling activity rather than business impact. Final KPIs track client NPS, program margin (held at or above 30%), faculty utilisation, and the repeat-business rate.