Introduction to Case Analysis Types of Cases

The "case method" is an approach to learning that encourages students to

extract useful lessons from the experiences of others ("cases"). Students

study accounts of specific events in order to discover general principles that

they can apply in other situations.

Cases tend to fall into one of three categories that sometimes overlap: 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.

What might you be expected to do with a case? 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.

Learning from Case Analysis

Written by Robert D. Austin and Robert L. Kelley. For private circulation only

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.

One Approach to Case Analysis

The figure to the left describes the

general approach to case analysis used

in this tutorial. It's by no means the only

approach that exists, but it's a

worthwhile one to try as you get started.

Getting Oriented

Identifying Problems

Performing Analysis

Action Planning

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.

Case Analysis Overview Analyzing a case is not just about digging. It's also about climbing back out

to examine what you've unearthed, deciding what it means, determining

what to analyze next, and digging some more. Illustrated here:

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.

Your First Pass

Quickly read the opening section. In roughly a page, this important part

of the case typically identifies the place and time setting, reveals the type of

case this is, and signals what problem or issue might be the starting point for

analysis. Along with the assignment questions, this section provides the

most-reliable clues for beginning to solve the mystery of the case.

Flip through the pages, look at the section headings and exhibit titles, and

skim parts of the body text that immediately catch your eye. Also glance

through the exhibits, which usually appear at the end.

Read and re-read the assignment questions, and compare them with the

section headings and exhibits. Try to gain an initial impression of where you

might find answers to the questions (under which headings, in which

exhibits, and how the exhibits relate to relevant sections of the case).

Defining the Problem

Based on your first pass, take a preliminary stab at writing a sentence or

two that summarizes:

the type of case it appears to be (Decision, Problem, or Evaluation)

your impression of the main problem(s) or issue(s) that might be the

appropriate focus of your analysis

Bear in mind that your initial impressions of the problem statement might

change. Nevertheless, trying to define the problem early will help focus your

thinking as you read the case in more detail.

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.

Reading the Case Carefully

Return to the beginning of the case, read it carefully, and add to your

original notes and highlights. Pause to think about certain passages; then re-

read them. Ask yourself: What's happening? What does this mean for the

company? Will it succeed? What problems can I see coming?

You may have gut feelings about some of the information that suggests

particular significance, perhaps numbers or other facts. Circle or highlight

those. You'll be wrong about some of them because some may be

intentionally false leads ("red herrings") inserted by the case writer.

Nevertheless, most cases will require that you synthesize numbers or facts

from different sections to conduct important analyses. As you analyze more

cases, you'll get better at spotting potentially important bits of information.

Don't worry if not everything becomes clear immediately. That's just the

way this works.

Bringing Outside Concepts Into Your Analysis

As you read carefully, you might begin to see connections to principles,

frameworks, and theories with which you are already familiar from this or

another class.

To help identify appropriate frameworks, ask questions such as these:

"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.

Revisiting Your Problem Statement

Now that you've read the case carefully, return to your initial statement of

the problem or issue at the heart of the case. Do you need to revise it after

your careful reading? Always remain open to the fact that the meaning of a

case may shift as you discover new evidence, just as a detective

investigating a crime must be open to new evidence.

Take a moment to list the key concerns, decisions, problems, or challenges

that affect the case protagonist. Then use your judgment to prioritize the

items in your list. What do you most need to understand first? What factors

do other answers and action plans depend on?

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.

Analysis Types: Qualitative

Typically, you'll do qualitative analysis based on your reading and

interpretation of the case. Ask yourself: What is fact and what is opinion?

Which facts are contributing to the problem? Which are the causes?

Qualitative factors should be prioritized and fully developed to support your

argument. Make notes about your evolving interpretations, always being

careful to list the evidence or reasons that support them.

Qualitative information in a case can be a mix of objective and subjective

information. For example, you may need to assess the validity of quotations

from company executives, each of whom has a subjective opinion. Reports

from external industry analysts or descriptions of what other companies in

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.

Analysis Types: Quantitative

Quantitative data—such as amounts of materials, money, time, and so on-

might be embedded in the text or provided in tabular form in the exhibits

(often both). It can be difficult to know which calculations to do, what

formulas to apply, and how to interpret the results. Don't sweat this. Try a

few simple calculations such as ratios and growth rates over time. If some of

those provide insight, great; if not, nothing is lost but a little time. Use

simple calculations to determine what other things you might want to assess

quantitatively.

Quantitatively rich cases may seem intimidating; some people don't enjoy

calculating or relying on math to reach conclusions. You might need to

calculate, say, a net present value in a finance case, or the capacity of a

production system to locate the bottleneck in an operations case. Don't be

fooled into thinking that just applying those standard analyses is the point of

a case.

Be prepared if the professor asks, "How is that number relevant to this

situation?" or "How would you incorporate it into your decision in favor of one

approach over another?" or "Is that number even relevant in this situation?"

Identifying Useful Data

To maintain your analysis priorities, first identify what data you have and

what data you need. Note where in the case you might find the data you

require. For each of your top priorities, list the sources of data that look most

promising.

A common misconception is that crunching numbers leads to one solution

that is beyond debate. Numbers often provide useful insights, but they

usually also give an incomplete picture. The vast majority of cases won't

hinge on a vital calculation that yields a single right answer. You'll have to

interpret the numbers you crunch, just as you interpret what you read in the

text.

In short, focus on what the numbers actually mean. Davis Maister's article,

"How to Avoid Getting Lost in the Numbers" outlines a process for doing just

that.

Identifying Useful Data It's important to read between the lines because no case describes the

full complexity of every event and because case writers aim to maintain a

neutral voice. For each factual statement or description in the case, ask what

might be missing, why it's not there, and what implications its absence has.

To organize your facts, you can draw a cause-and-effect diagram, a

timeline, or some other kind of visual organizer. You might also prioritize

facts in different ways. Issues of strategic importance to a firm are not

always urgent; nor are urgent issues necessarily strategic.

Matching Frameworks to Data

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.

Revisiting, Refining, and Reflecting Sometime near the midpoint of your analysis—use your judgment to

decide when—take a few minutes to revisit the layers of the case again. At

times the results from a case analysis disorient you, and you realize you had

something wrong earlier.

Your analysis process might go something like this...

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.

Knowing When to Stop

How do you know when to stop analyzing? A well-written case will almost

always cough up one more relevant fact or interpretation that's tempting to

consider. But as a practical matter, you need to use good judgment to

determine how to end the process at some point.

A bit of trial-and-error is perfectly normal. Some of the things you decide

to analyze might provide little insight, and that's okay. Other things don't

yield much at first but turn out to be more valuable later, after you've

investigated further. So don't throw anything away or set anything aside too

quickly.

One approach is to stop analyzing when you're not learning very much

anymore. If when revisiting your problem statement and recommendations,

you find that you're not changing them very much, you're getting close to

being finished.

Of course, it could be that you're not learning more simply because you're

not digging very deeply into the case. In that situation, the clue would be

that your analysis so far doesn't seem very substantial. If this happens, try

putting the case aside for a few minutes and then coming back to it or

talking it over with someone else. Approach the case in a different way-

perhaps read it from back to front. In short, try to jolt loose an insight that

will help you move forward.

Action Planning

quantitative.

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

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.

An Approach for Action Planning

Step 1: Identify Tasks

Brainstorm all of the tasks that you need to accomplish your objective. It's

helpful to start this process at the very beginning. What's the very first

action you'll need to take? What comes next? Should any steps be prioritized

to meet specific deadlines, or because of limits on other people's availability?

Step 2: Analyze and Delegate Tasks

Now that you can see the entire project from beginning to end, look at each

task in greater detail. Are there any steps you could drop without

compromising your objective? Which tasks could you delegate to someone

else on your team or to a freelancer? Are there deadlines for specific steps?

Do you need to arrange additional resources?

Step 3: Double-Check with SCHEMES

Use the SCHEMES mnemonic to check that your plan is comprehensive.

SCHEMES stands for:

Space.

Cash.

Helpers/People.

Equipment.

Materials.

Expertise.

Systems.

An Approach for Action Planning

You may not need to think about all of the SCHEME components to

complete your project. For a small internal project to streamline the format

of your team's reports, for instance, you might need to think only about

Helpers/People, Expertise, and Systems.

An action plan is a list of tasks that you need to do to complete a simple

project or objective. To draw up an action plan, simply list the tasks in the

order that you need to complete them.

As you finalize the process, keep in mind the short-, medium-, and long-

term horizons for the project. Action plans are useful for small projects, as

their deadlines are not especially tough to meet and the need for

coordinating other people is not high. As your projects grow, however, you'll

need to develop more-formal project management skills, particularly if you're

responsible for scheduling other people's time or you need to complete

projects to tight deadlines.

[adapted, in part, from Mindtools.com]

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.

Revisiting, Refining and Reflecting

In most case discussions, the professor will ask for general lessons

learned (although sometimes students might be expected to develop those

on their own outside of class). To prepare for this part of a case discussion,

take a few minutes at the end of your analysis to think about lessons that

you might apply to other cases. List four or five major takeaways that you

think your case analysis has revealed.

Other Cases and Case Analyses

The approach to analysis we've outlined in this tutorial is sound, as it has

been tested in real classrooms. Nonetheless, given the wide variety of case

types and topics, the approach may sometimes lead you to a dead end when

you come to a new case. After all, each case is unique.

When that happens, don't give up. Use your judgment to try something a

different way. If moving to more analysis seems like a problem (because you

don't know what to do next), try going up in layers. You also might revisit

the context, the problem definition, or your past ideas about action plans.

Like a detective solving a crime, sometimes you'll get stuck. But as you work

on more and more cases, you'll get stuck less often, and you'll have more

ideas about how to proceed.

We've started you down the road toward developing expertise in case

analysis, but this is only a beginning. Real expertise comes from doing it

again and again.

Good luck!

Case Analysis Worksheet

This form can be used to organize your thoughts about a case. As you perform your analysis remain

open to the fact that your interpretation of the facts may change and therefore you should constantly

revisit your answers.

Define the Problem: Describe the type of case and what problem(s) or issue(s) should be the focus for

your analysis.

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'.