Welcome to the

Case Analysis Coach

This tutorial is designed to start you down the road toward becoming an expert at analyzing
business cases. You'll learn how to identify and define the business concepts raised by a case, as
well as to develop analysis-based solutions, recommendations, and action plans. These skills
will prepare you for class discussions and exams.
You will have access to a complete real case, called Komatsu Ltd. and Project G., so that you can
apply what you learn to a concrete example. You will also get other helpful resources, such as a
Case Analysis Worksheet and samples of class-discussion notes on the Komatsu case that were
prepared by real students like you. In addition, smaller excerpts from other real cases are used
to illustrate some of the steps in case analysis.

Introduction to Case Analysis

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

Learning from Case Analysis
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.
The Harvard approach to cases is inductive. The inductive approach begins with specifics and moves to the
general. This approach may be different from what you are used to.
Another common approach to cases is deductive. It provides students practice in applying a general
principle or framework 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. Note that this is opposite the inductive
approach.
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.
There are so many different possible uses of cases that this tutorial cannot, of course, address all of them.

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.

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
Case Analysis Overview
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 welldefined 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.
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.
Let's see how all this might work for a particular case.

Your First Pass

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.

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).
Using the Komatsu LTD and Project G case complete a "First Pass" now.

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.
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.

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 subquestions 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?
Revise your problem statement, if applicable, and list and prioritize your key
concerns.

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 datasuch 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.
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.

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 analysisuse your judgment to decide whentake 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.
The Case Method is sometimes called "Education for Judgment." Click here to
learn more

Education for Judgment

The Case Method is sometimes called "Education for Judgment." 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.
At this point, you've gotten oriented and done a careful read, so you've got all the facts "on the
table."
Now what do you do?
This is one of the most difficult moments in case analysis-you need to begin to structure your
investigation.
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.

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 wordlimited 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.

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]
Summarize your analysis to this point. Include the evidence you have

accumulated that supports one interpretation over another.

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.
List a few recommendations or actions that come from 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. For examples of how real students have prepared analyses of the Komatsu case
for different purposes, click on these links.

Komatsu Case Notes: Student 1 (72kb - pdf)

Komatsu Case Notes: Student 2 (65kb - pdf)

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!