Week 4 Readings and Video Notes

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 yo see any new direction for analysis that weren't obvious before?

You ability to demonstrate that you can think logically and consistently by being able to:

1. Identify, prioritize, and deal with issues and problems; 2. Judge the quality and relevance of information — fact, opinion, hearsay, lies, and so on; 3. Make and assess necessary assumptions; 4. Relate the information to the issues, problems, and decisions in the case; 5. Resolve conflicting information; 6. Analyze by asking and answering the right questions and correctly using appropriate analytical tools; 7. Determine and rank appropriate criteria for making decisions; 8. Generate and evaluate alternative courses of action; 9. Make a decision (take a stand) and defend it with persuasive, well-ordered, convincing argument; 10. Develop a reasonably detailed action plan showing an awareness of what might happen; 11. Build on other students' arguments to advance the discussion toward a coherent conclusion rather than making unrelated points or repeating ones already made; and 12. Generalize: in traditional lectures instructors expect students to take the general lessons from the lecture and apply them to specific problems; case method instructors expect students to go from the specific lessons in a case to more general lessons.

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.

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

1. decision cases (Describe a decision faced by there case protagonist. The student ultimately must choose among a finite set of distinct decision alternatives) 2. Problem cases (require a student to diagnose a problem in a business case and to formulate possible solutions) 3. Evaluation Cases (illustrate a business success or failure. The student analyzes the underlying reasons for that success or failure to arrive at management lessons

The process of working on a case:

1. define a problem 2. sort relevant from irrelevant information 3. separate fact from opinion 4. interpret and analyze information 5. come to a reasoned decision and course of action 6. communicate your thoughts clearly and persuasively to others during class discussions

Case analysis preparation steps from Crawford:

1. define the problem (type of case) 2. List and outside concepts to apply (principles, frameworks or theories) 3. list relevant qualitative data (quality or character) 4. List relevant quantitative data (numbers or amounts) 5. describe the results of the analysis (evidence of analysis) 6. describe alternative actions (list and prioritize) 7. Describe your preferred action plan (short, medium, and long term)

The effectiveness of a small group case discussion can be increased substantially if you and the other members of the group adhere to the following guidelines:

1. each student must come to the group meeting with a through knowledge of any assigned readings and analysis of the case. the small group session is not the place to start case preparation. 2. each group member is expected to participate actively int he discussion 3. it is not necessary to have a group leader. all members of the group are responsible for making their own decisions based on what is said plus their own case analysis 4. it is also not necessary to have a recording secretary. participants are responsible for their own notes. it is important to be able to recognize a good idea when you hear one. 5. Consensus is normally not necessary. No one has to agree with anyone else. 6. If it is important to you, work at clarifying individual disagreements after the small group discussion, especially if only one or two people are involved 7. set a time limit for discussion and stick to it. effective small group case discussions can take less than 30 minutes and because of your workload, 30 minutes will have to be adequate for most cases

General outline for how a report should be organized:

1. executive summary 2. statement of problem, opportunity and objectives 3. analysis of the situation 4. identification and evaluation of alternatives 5. decision, course of action and implementation

Cases can be used in several ways:

1. individual preparation for a class discussion, followed by small group discussion in preparation for a class discussion, followed by class discussion 2. a written report or in class presentation of a case 3. a written examination of your ability to handle a case

Steps to help in individual case preparation:

1. read the case once quickly to get an overview 2. skin any exhibits in the case just to see what type of information is available 3. find out-frequently from the few paragraphs at the beginning and end of the case- who the decision maker is (this will be your role), what his or her immediate concern, problem, or issue appears to be, why this concern has arisen and when the decision must be made 4. read the case again, more carefully. this time highlight key information, make notes to yourself in the margin, and write down ideas as they occur to you. At this stage you are trying to familiarize yourself as thoroughly as possibly with the case information. having done so, you are ready to begin your analysis. 5. Try to answer at least the following questions: a. What business is the organization in? What are its objectives? What are its strengths and weaknesses? What opportunities and threats exist? Who are its customers? What does it have to do well to satisfy customers? How do you know? b. What is the decision to be made, problem to be solved, or issue to be resolved? How do you know — what is your evidence? (Let the case data guide you — most cases will have sufficient data for you to "solve" the problems and are unlikely to contain vast amounts of completely irrelevant data.) c. What facts are relevant and key to a solution? Are they symptoms? Causes? What is your quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the organization's strengths and weaknesses? d. What do the facts mean for the problem? Here, learn to analyze — ask and answer lots of questions. e. What are the decision criteria? f. What are the alternatives? Are they relevant to the problem at hand? Although it is usually unwise to ignore the obvious solutions, most instructors appreciate creative solutions, provided they are sensible and supported by reasonable data. g. What is your evaluation of the alternatives in view of the decision criteria? What are the pros and cons of each? h. Which alternative or combination of alternatives would you choose? Why? i. What is your plan of action? Outline your plan by answering the questions who, when, what, where, why, and how. j. What results do you expect? Why?

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.

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.

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?

Knowing when to stop when performing analyses:

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.

Revisiting, refining and reflecting during action planning

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.

Opening section of a case:

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.

Education for Judgement:

Just concluded analysis, where to go next? --reorient analysis? Revisit/reframe problem statement? additional analysis A? addiptnla analysis B? ...so on. Additional analysis n? Reflect?

Analysis type: 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.

Revisiting, refining and reflecting during performing analyses:

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 o-getting oriented layer 1- identifying problems layer 2- performing analysis -reflection layer 3- action planing

SCHEMES stands for:

Space Cash Helpers/people Equipment Materials Expertise Systems

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.

Engineerings professionals:

Those who have an engineering degree and/or work as expected for engineers; responsibilities include site supervision and conceptualization of work contracts, including defining expected technical and quality standards, and certifying work delivery.

Sales and marketing personnel:

Those whose role requires extensive interaction with external customers to sell products and services and provide after-sales support.

Liaison Personnel:

Those whose role requires extensive liaising with external entities, especially government bodies.

Supervisors:

Those whose role requires extensive supervising of workers—internal or external—who provide primarily physical labour.

Office support personnel:

Those whose role requires primarily data collection, collation, storage, retrieval and interalia support.

Service support personnel:

Those whose role requires support through service rendered by their own effort, mostly through physical labour.

Professional knowledge holders:

Those whose work requires application of professional knowledge, which they have acquired through professional certification and/or through experience, for example, chartered accountants and lawyers

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. 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.

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

Firming up recommendations during action planning

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 the Komatsu case for different purposes, click on these links.

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.

Decision makers encounter a number of common frustrations:

a shortage of good information omg which to base decisions, a shortage of time in which to make decisions, uncertainty about how plans will work out, and a lack of opportunity to reduce this uncertainty at a reasonable cost

The case method is sometimes called education for judgement-this description emphasized

a truth about case analysis: You have to make your own judgments about what to do next. What to pay attention to and what to disregard. There's no magic formula, thus no unambiguously right or wrong next step.

In cases, much of your preparation time should be spent

analyzing and interpreting information.

Decision Case

are probably the most common type. Decision cases begin by describing a decision faced by the case protagonist, and often identifying distinct decision alternatives. These cases ask students to choose an alternative and to defend that choice with arguments and evidence.

Problem Cases

are similar to decision cases, in that they ask students to assume the role of a case protagonist and make recommendations, but they don't provide clear alternatives from which to choose. Instead, they describe a problem the protagonist must confront, and challenge students to invent and justify an action plan for dealing with the problem.

Hubtown chose to adopt a behaviour-based approach to performance management. This model emphasized

both outcomes and behaviours; while results might be specified at an organizational, team, or individual level, individual behaviours could be monitored, appraised, and coached through a standardized process

Quantitatively rich cases Amy 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.

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

Rehabilitation involved

dealing with various stakeholders, such as the community, political parties, and local bodies, and managing the expectations of all these stakeholders within each project's time and cost budgets.

When working with cases is important to pay attention to all the

details. And understanding the situation.

Students study accounts of specific events in order to

discover general principles that they can apply in other situations

What might you be expected to do with a case?

discuss it--write a report or essay about it---create a presentation

Applying judgement, analysis usually doesn't provide definitive answers. But as you do more of it, a clearers picture often starts to

emerge, or to preponderance of evidence begins to point to one interpretation rather than others.

From the events of a case, students ca...

erive 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.

In each case situation, the decision maker is

expected to determine what problems and opportunities existed, to analyze the situation, to generate and evaluate alternative courses of action, and to recommend and implement a plan of action.

Cases can also be used to illustrate the application of

general principles to realistic contexts, as a way of broadening understanding of those general principles

General approach to case analysis:

getting oriented--identifying problems--performing analysis--action planning

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.

Analysis describes

he 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.

What you do next depends on your own judgment,

how you decide to structure your investigation, based on your assessment of how this particular case's structure, and how it has revealed its meaning so far.

Basic challenge of assignment questions:

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

Vimal called Hubtown a technical company

in which specific engineering and project-management skillsets were paramount. According to him, there were three major domains in the construction business. One was designing and constructing buildings. Another was obtaining timely government approvals. This expertise was needed because almost 250 approvals were required from the government at various stages of a construction project. The final domain, if the company was operating in a slum rehabilitation space, was managing rehabilitation

The Harvard approach to cases is

inductive. The inductive approach beings with specifics and moves to the general.

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.

The case method is an approach to

learning that encourages students to extract useful lessons from the experiences of otheres

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.

The need to be a skillful communicator arises repeatedly in

management

Employees liked working for Hubtown because

of the opportunity to learn new skills and grow in their fields.

Assignment questions are

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

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.

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.

Evaluation Cases

sometimes called Best-Practice or Worst-Practice cases, portray situations that are interesting or remarkable, usually because they are especially successful or unsuccessful. These cases typically do not include an obvious single problem or decision. Instead, the student must look at all that is relevant, good, bad or in-between and those outcomes must be evaluated to provide a clear assessment.

Ways to teaching with cases-another common approach to cases is deductive. It provides

students practice in a applying a general principle or framwork they've already been taught. It begins with a broad structure and asks students to apply it to specific events; moving from general to specific.

As you finalize the process during action planning, 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.

Based on first pass of reading you shouldd try to write two sentences the summarizes:

the type of case it appears to be (decision, problem or evaluation) and your impression of the main problems or issues that might be the appropriate focus of your analysis

The case method general theme is

to learn by doing, rather than by listening

The objective of each case is

to leave you at a point much like the one that the individual in the case actually confronted--you must make a decision

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.

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.

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 often provide the 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.

Case

written description of a situation actually faced by a manager. Cases commonly involve a decision to be made, a problem to be solved or an issue to be settled.

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.