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Decision Cases describe a decision faced by the case protagonist. The student ultimately must choose among a finite set of distinct decision alternatives. Problem Cases require a student to diagnose a problem in a business case and to formulate possible solutions. Evaluation Cases illustrate a business success or failure. The student analyzes the underlying reasons for that success or failure to arrive at management lessons.
Discuss it. Harvard professor David Garvin, an expert case teacher and writer, sometimes says, "A case is a literary form intended to be discussed." A case does not fully achieve its purpose until students talk about it, just as the script of a play realizes its purpose when performed on stage. You should come to class prepared to discuss a case-specifically, to say what you think the decision should be, to articulate how the problem ought to be solved, and to defend your solution thoroughly, insightfully, and persuasively using data from the case. Write a report or essay about it. The process of arriving at your recommendations for an exam or a paper is similar to how you prepare to discuss a case in class. However, you have the additional challenge of explaining your logic in written form, often within a limited number of pages or words. This limitation is especially pertinent on an exam. Create a presentation. The analysis you'll do for a presentation will be similar to how you prepare for a discussion, exam, or paper on a case. The difference is the need to create presentation materials to help you explain your analysis and recommendations to a live audience. In short, you are the leader not merely a participant.
From the events of a case, students can derive general principles, ideas, and theories. Sometimes these are famous frameworks, such as Porter's theory of generic strategies, Williamson's transaction cost theory, or the general principles of revenue recognition. Deriving or discovering a framework inductively from a real case helps you remember it and apply it to other business situations. That's because you've seen why it's needed, how to use it, and what its limits are. The role of the instructor in a case-based class is to guide students through this discovery process, to ask penetrating questions that refine and improve students' understanding, and to clarify the applicability of general concepts to other business settings.
Assignment Questions
Assignment questions are a good place to begin a case analysis. Usually your instructor will supply these, but occasionally they are included within a case, typically at the end. Some professors provide many detailed assignment questions; others offer relatively few or less-detailed ones. Assignment questions and questions that come up in a class discussion usually don't match up precisely. In general, assignment questions require a deeper exploration of the nuances of a case to be answered effectively, but they might merely prompt your thinking about key issues. Whatever your professor's approach to assignment questions, the basic challenge remains the same: identifying the important issues at the heart of the case, addressing those through analysis, and identifying what lessons from the case can be applied more broadly. Examples from the Komatsu LTD. and Project G case will be examined throughout this tutorial. To optimize your learning experience follow the suggestions in the "Try It" notes so that you will become familiar with the examples provided.
Getting Oriented
It's useful to think of a case analysis as digging deeper and deeper into the layers of a case. 1. You start at the surface, Getting Oriented and examining the overall case landscape. 2. Then you begin to dig, Identifying Problems, as well as possible alternative solutions. 3. Digging deeper, Performing Analyses you identify information that exposes the issues, gather data, perform calculations that might provide insight. 4. Finally, you begin Action Planning to outline short-, medium-, and long-term well-defined steps. Typically, you'll need to repeat this process multiple times, and as you do, you'll discover new analytical directions, evolving your assessment of the case and conclusion.
Often your examination of information about a problem will change your idea of what the real problem is-and about what to analyze next. The process is similar to when a detective investigating a crime shifts his or her opinion about the most likely suspect as more clues come to light.
Gather your materials and tools. These include the case itself, the assignment questions, and any other materials your instructor might provide (e.g., a spreadsheet or supplementary reading). Be prepared to take notes in the margins and to highlight important numbers or passages. This Case Analysis Worksheet can also be helpful as you organize information to use in your analysis.
Identifying Problems
After you are generally oriented to the case, it's time to dig deeper to test your initial assumptions. The digging process often begins with trying to find the answer to an assignment question or to a question that occurred to you during your first pass. Your opening questions lead you to sub-questions and sometimes to new questions altogether. Patterns will begin to emerge, as will major themes, problems, and issues that unify your questions and that ultimately elucidate the major pedagogical purpose of the case.
"What kind of course is this?" A marketing course, for example, will typically employ marketing frameworks. "What clues did the instructor provide?" Assignment questions, the title of the module, or the syllabus might signal the specific focus of the case. "What are the assigned readings?" Supplemental readings (e.g., an Industry Note, article, or chapter) often provide the theoretical framework used as a starting point for the analysis of a new case. "Where you are in the course?" Early in a course an instructor will choose cases that are pretty straightforward, but later in the term there's often a twist or a sophisticated refinement that you need to look for.
Performing Analyses
"Analysis" describes the varied and crucial things you do with information in the case, to shed light on the problems and issues you've identified. That might mean calculating and comparing cumulative growth rates for different periods from the year-by-year financials in a case's exhibits. Or it might mean pulling together seemingly unrelated facts from two different sections of the case, and combining them logically to arrive at an important conclusion or conjecture.
Applying Judgement
Analysis usually doesn't provide definitive answers. But as you do more of it, a clearer picture often starts to emerge, or the preponderance of evidence begins to point to one interpretation rather than others. Don't expect a case analysis to yield a "final answer." If you're accustomed to doing analysis that ends with a right answer, coming up with a possible solution that simply reflects your best judgment might frustrate you. But remember that cases, much like real-world business experiences, rarely reveal an absolutely correct answer, no matter how deeply you analyze them.
the industry have done might seem more objective; no one in the case has a vested interest in this information. A company's internal PowerPoint presentation should be considered separately and differently from a newspaper article about the company. Cases mix firsthand quotations and opinions with third-person narratives, so you need to consider the reliability of sources. As in real life, you shouldn't take all case information at face value.
As conclusions or evidence in favor or against certain alternatives begin to emerge, you might spot connections to principles, frameworks, and theories that you've already covered in class. It's often worthwhile to try applying what seems like a relevant framework to the raw data or to data that have been transformed in some way by your analysis. Once you've begun interpreting your analyses in the context of a framework, you'll often start to see more opportunities for analysis, suggested by the framework itself. It's usually a good idea to follow these paths, although not all will prove to be fruitful.
Layer 0 - Getting Oriented Layer 1 - Identifying Problems Layer 2 - Performing Analyses o Reflection Layer 3 - Action Planning During the reflection phase consider these questions:
Do you need to refine your original problem statement? Has your sense of what the real problem is evolved? Do you see any new directions for analysis that weren't obvious before? Then take some time for reflection to identify general lessons that might apply to other cases. Odds are there are several such lessons.
Action Planning
Recommended action plans should state what would be objectively best for the case company given its goals, resources, and situation. But they should also outline possible implementation objectives and hurdles. Action plans should include short-, medium-, and long-term steps that will concretely carry out recommendations like these. Real-life situations often have hidden agendas and nuances that can affect how an action plan is crafted. These elements are also relevant in the analysis of a full case, except perhaps for cases that are purely or primarily quantitative. At some point, you might need to develop your favored case action plan in a degree of detail that exceeds that of alternative plans. If you're operating with space constraints (on a word-limited case exam, for instance), you may need to explore just one alternative in full detail, rather than developing all alternatives at the same level of detail.
Decision Alternatives
At this point, stop to list a few possible recommendations for the case and think about possible action plans. These deliverables are, after all, the ultimate objectives of your analysis. Try not to restrict yourself to one solution. Let your conclusion emerge from the evidence; don't force the evidence to fit your conclusion. Remain open-minded as you proceed to the next step. List possible recommendations or actions based on your analysis of the case.
Firming Up Recommendations
When you finish your case analysis, you still must articulate your recommendations and your action plan. You also must assemble the arguments and evidence needed to defend those proposals. The format of your case analysis will depend on what you're being asked to do. You might take one approach if you're preparing for an in-class "cold call" or a class discussion, but another approach if you're writing a paper or preparing for a team presentation, or still another if you're taking an exam.
List any outside concepts that can be applied: Write down any principles, frameworks or theories that can be applied to this case.
List relevant qualitative data: evidence related to or based on the quality or character of something.
List relevant quantitative data: evidence related to or based on the amount or number of something.
Describe the results of your analysis: What evidence have you accumulated that supports one interpretation over another.
Describe alternative actions: List and prioritize possible recommendations or actions that come out of your analysis.
Describe your preferred action plan: Write a clear statement of what you would recommend including short, medium and long-term steps to be carried out.
Copyright 2011 Harvard Business School Publishing This document is for use only with the Harvard Business Publishing 'Case Analysis Coach'.