How to Approach a Case

This is not the only approach that exists, but it’s a worthwhile one to try as you get started.

1. 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.

a. 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.
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 and any other related materials to supplement your reading. Be prepared to take notes in the margins and to highlight important numbers or passages. Use the Case Analysis Worksheet to help you organize information to use in your analysis.

b. 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. 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.

c. 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.
Try It. Before you view the examples provided, think about or jot down your first impression of the type of case and preliminary problems or issues described. You can record your thoughts to this case, or any case, by using the Case Analysis Worksheet.

2. 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 the issue of the case 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.

a. 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.
Try It. Take the time to read the case carefully, making notes and highlighting anything that seems significant.

b. 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.

c. 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?
Try It. Revise your problem statement, if applicable, and list and prioritize your key concerns.

3. 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.

a. 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.

b. 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 first-hand 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.

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?"

c. 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. Try It. List both the quantitative and qualitative data that you have highlighted. Then prioritize them.
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.

d. Matching Frameworks to Data

As conclusions or evidence in favour 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.

e. 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 * 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.

f. 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.

Tip: The Case Method is sometimes called “Education for Judgment.”

4. 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 favoured 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.

a. 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: * S pace. * C ash. * H elpers/People. * E quipment. * M aterials. * E xpertise. * S ystems.
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.
Try It Summarize your analysis to this point. Include the evidence you have accumulated that supports one interpretation over another.

b. 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.

Try It. List a few recommendations or actions that come from your analysis of the case.

c. 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. For examples of how real students have prepared analyses of a case for different purposes.

d. Revisiting, Refining and Reflecting
In most case discussions, the lecturer will ask for general lessons learned (although sometimes you 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.

e. Other Cases and Case Analyses

The approach to analysis I’ve outlined is sound, as it has been tested in real Harvard 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 judgement 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.

I’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!