How to Solve a Case Study
Cases are included in many courses in Administrative Studies to give students an appreciation of the hard realities of business and the constraints involved in decision making. By exposure to a variety of situations and diverse problems, the student can experience, to some degree, the challenges and dilemmas of the decision maker. Cases are usually based on real situations. For reasons of privacy and confidentiality, the persons, the companies, and the locations involved are typically disguised.
When assigning case analyses, instructors expect that students will:
• Study the information provided in each case,
• Attempt to diagnose the nature of the problem or problems involved,
• Search for alternative ways in which the problems can be resolved,
• Recommend and justify the course of action that is most likely to be effective. The justification should rely, to a large extent, on theoretical principles.
Sometimes students feel disappointed because the cases sometimes do not appear to be
“dramatic.” However, because the cases do represent the realities of organizations, they are often likely to be somewhat mundane, at least to the outside observer. Most of the incidents are based on events that were actually faced by managers and their subordinates on a day-today basis. Very often, cases do not contain all the information that the student would like to have. This is often done intentionally, or at least knowingly, by the case writer.
In real life, a manager must frequently make decisions on the basis of limited information.
Sometimes students exert much energy searching for the “correct answer” or the “one best solution” without realizing that, in case studies, the stress is not on the “right” or “wrong” answer. Instead, the emphasis is on the student’s ability to take into account all the variables that