PREPARING A CASE STUDY

Step 1: The Short Cycle Process

1. Quickly read the case. If it is a long case, at this stage you may want to read only the
first few and last paragraphs. You should then be able to
2. Answer the following questions:
a. Who is the decision maker in this case, and what is their position and
responsibilities?
b. What appears to be the issue (of concern, problem, challenge, or opportunity)
and its significance for the organization?
c. Why has the issue arisen and why is the decision maker involved now?
d. When does the decision maker have to decide, resolve, act or dispose of the
issue? What is the urgency to the situation?
3. Take a look at the exhibits to see what numbers have been provided.
4. Review the case subtitles to see what areas are covered in more depth.
5. Review the case questions if they have been provided. This may give you some clues
are what the main issues are to be resolved.
You should now be familiar with what the case study is about, and are ready to begin the
process of analyzing it. You are not done yet! Many students mistakenly believe that this is all
the preparation needed for a discussion of a case study. If this was the extent of your
preparation, your ability to contribute to the discussion would likely be limited to the first one
quarter of the class time allotted. You need to go further to prepare the case, using the next
step. One of the primary reasons for doing the short cycle process is to give you an indication of
how much work will need to be done to prepare the case study properly.
Step 2: The Long Cycle Process
At this point, the task consists of two parts:

A detailed reading of the case, and then

Analyzing the case.

When you are doing the detailed reading of the case study, look for the following sections:

Opening paragraph: introduces the situation.

Background information: industry, organization, products, history, competition,
financial information, and anything else of significance.
Specific (functional) area of interest: marketing, finance, operations, human
resources, or integrated.
The specific problem or decision(s) to be made.
Alternatives open to the decision maker, which may or may not be stated in the
case.
Conclusion: sets up the task, any constraints or limitations, and the urgency of
the situation.

However, not all case studies will follow this format. The purpose here is to thoroughly
understand the situation and the decisions that will need to be made. Take your time, make
notes, and keep focused on your objectives.

Analyzing the case should take the following steps:

1. Defining the issue(s)/Problem Statement
The problem statement should be a clear, concise statement of exactly what needs to be
addressed. This is not easy to write! The work that you did in the short cycle process
answered the basic questions. Now it is time to decide what the main issues to be
addressed are going to be in much more detail. Asking yourself the following questions
may help:
a. What appears to be the problem(s) here?
b. How do I know that this is a problem? Note that by asking this question, you will
be helping to differentiate the symptoms of the problem from the problem itself.
Example: while declining sales or unhappy employees are a problem to most
companies, they are in fact, symptoms of underlying problems which need to be
addressed.
c. What are the immediate issues that need to be addressed? This helps to
differentiate between issues that can be resolved within the context of the case,
and those that are bigger issues that needed to addressed at a another time
(preferably by someone else!).
d. Differentiate between importance and urgency for the issues identified. Some
issues may appear to be urgent, but upon closer examination are relatively
unimportant, while others may be far more important (relative to solving our
problem) than urgent. You want to deal with important issues in order of urgency
to keep focused on your objective. Important issues are those that have a
significant effect on:
i.
profitability,
ii.
strategic direction of the company,
iii.
source of competitive advantage,
iv.
morale of the company's employees, and/or customer satisfaction.
2. Analyzing the case data
In analyzing the case data, you are trying to answer the following:
a. Why or how did these issues arise? You are trying to determine cause and
effect for the problems identified. You cannot solve a problem that you cannot
determine the cause of! It may be helpful to think of the organization in
question as consisting of the following components:
i. resources, such as materials, equipment, or supplies, and
ii. people who transform these resources using
iii. processes, which creates something of greater value.
Now, where are the problems being caused within this framework, and why?
b. Who is affected most by this issues? You are trying to identify who are the
relevant stakeholders to the situation, and who will be affected by the
decisions to be made.
c. What are the constraints and opportunities implicit to this situation? It is very
rare that resources are not a constraint, and allocations must be made on the
assumption that not enough will be available to please everyone.
d. What do the numbers tell you? You need to take a look at the numbers given
in the case study and make a judgment as to their relevance to the problem
identified. Not all numbers will be immediately useful or relevant, but you
need to be careful not to overlook anything. When deciding to analyze

numbers, keep in mind why you are doing it, and what you intend to do with
the result. Use common sense and comparisons to industry standards when
making judgments as to the meaning of your answers to avoid jumping to
conclusions.
3. Generating alternatives
This section deals with different ways in which the problem can be resolved. Typically,
there are many (the joke is at least three), and being creative at this stage helps. Things
to remember at this stage are:
a. Be realistic! While you might be able to find a dozen alternatives, keep in
mind that they should be realistic and fit within the constraints of the situation.
b. The alternatives should be mutually exclusive, that is, they cannot happen at
the same time.
c. Not making a decision pending further investigation is not an acceptable
decision for any case study that you will analyze. A manager can always
delay making a decision to gather more information, which is not managing at
all! The whole point to this exercise is to learn how to make good decisions,
and having imperfect information is normal for most business decisions, not
the exception.
d. Doing nothing as in not changing your strategy can be a viable alternative,
provided it is being recommended for the correct reasons, as will be
discussed below.
e. Avoid the meat sandwich method of providing only two other clearly
undesirable alternatives to make one reasonable alternative look better by
comparison. This will be painfully obvious to the reader, and just shows
laziness on your part in not being able to come up with more than one decent
alternative.
f. Keep in mind that any alternative chosen will need to be implemented at
some point, and if serious obstacles exist to successfully doing this, then you
are the one who will look bad for suggesting it.
Once the alternatives have been identified, a method of evaluating them and selecting
the most appropriate one needs to be used to arrive at a decision.
4. Selecting decision criteria
A very important concept to understand, they answer the question of how you are going
to decide which alternative is the best one to choose. Other than choosing randomly, we
will always employ some criteria in making any decision. Think about the last time that
you make a purchase decision for an article of clothing. Why did you choose the article
that you did? The criteria that you may have used could have been:
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
f.

(Product quality)
Operation and maintenance requirement
Need for training
Occupational health and safety aspects
Expected benefits
Reduction in energy and water consumption
i. Reduction in material consumption

ii. Reduction of waste

g. Whether any negative environmental impacts exceed the positive aspects
Key decision criteria should be:
i.

ii.
iii.

Brief, preferably in point form, such as

i. improve (or at least maintain) profitability,
ii. within our present (or future) resources and capabilities,
iii. within acceptable risk parameters,
iv. ease or speed of implementation,
v. minimize environmental impact,
vi. increase sales, market share, or return on investment,
vii. maintain customer satisfaction, corporate image,
viii. be consistent with the corporate mission or strategy,
ix. employee morale, safety, or turnover, and/or
x. retain flexibility
Measurable, at least to the point of comparison, such as alternative A will
improve profitability more that alternative B.
Be related to your problem statement, and alternatives. If you find that you are
talking about something else, that is a sign of a missing alternative or key
decision criteria, or a poorly formed problem statement.

5. Analyzing and evaluating alternatives

If you have done the above properly, this should be straightforward. You measure the
alternatives against each key decision criteria. Often you can set up a simple table with
key decision criteria as columns and alternatives as rows, and write this section based
on the table. Each alternative must be compared to each criteria and its suitability
ranked in some way, such as met/not met, or in relation to the other alternatives, such as
better than, or highest. This will be important to selecting an alternative. Another method
that can be used is to list the advantages and disadvantages (pros/cons) of each
alternative, and then discussing the short and long term implications of choosing each.
Note that this implies that you have already predicted the most likely outcome of each of
the alternatives. Some students find it helpful to consider three different levels of
outcome, such as best, worst, and most likely, as another way of evaluating alternatives.
6. Selecting the preferred alternative
You must have one! Engineers are decision makers with unique problem-solving
abilities; this is your opportunity to practice making decisions. Give a justification for your
decision (use the key decision criteria). Check to make sure that it is one (and only one)
of your alternatives and that it does resolve what you defined as the problem.

Material culled from http://plato.acadiau.ca/courses/Busi/IntroBus/CASEMETHOD.html