Essay Instructions: Task: Case Analysis
Scope: Group collaboration for an individual written report
The case study for this assessment is Bancolombia and will be posted on the class website.
In this case, your role is to review the historical information and evaluate performance. Did management make all the right decisions?
Your recommendations should build on the strength of your analysis of information available and insights about contemporary management theories/practices. In short, what would you have done if you were the ?boss??
Weighting: 30%
Assessment Criteria:
? Insightful identification of the management issues evident in/from the case study.
? Depth of analysis in turning information into insights addressing the core issue/s.
? Appropriateness of critique addressing the issues involved in the case study.
? Quality of memorandum/report presentation including clarity of expression, professionalism of layout and formatting, grammar and spelling.
What is a Case Study?
A case study is a description of an actual administrative situation involving a decision to be made or a problem to be solved. It can be a real situation that actually happened just as described, or portions have been disguised for reasons of privacy. Most case studies are written in such a way that the reader takes the place of the manager whose responsibility is to make decisions to help solve the problem. In almost all case studies, a decision must be made, although that decision might be to leave the situation as it is and do nothing.
How to Analyze a Case Study
While there is no one definitive "Case Method" or approach, there are common steps that most approaches recommend be followed in tackling a case study. It is inevitable that different Instructors will tell you to do things differently; this is part of life and will also be part of working for others. This variety is beneficial since it will show you different ways of approaching decision making. What follows is intended to be a rather general approach.
Preparing a Case Study
It helps to have a system when sitting down to prepare a case study as the amount of information and issues to be resolved can initially seem quite overwhelming. The following is a good way to start.
To start, quickly read the case. You should then be able to answer the following questions:
? Who is the decision maker in this case, and what is their position and responsibilities?
? What appears to be the issue (of concern, problem, challenge, or opportunity) and its significance for the organization?
? Why has the issue arisen and why is the decision maker involved now?
? When does the decision maker have to decide, resolve, act or dispose of the issue? What is the urgency to the situation?
Then, take a look at the Exhibits to see what numbers have been provided.
Next, review the case subtitles in detail to see what areas are covered in more depth.
Finally, 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.
Analyzing the case should take the following steps:
? Defining the issue(s)
? Analyzing the case data
? Generating alternatives
? Selecting decision criteria
? Analyzing and evaluating alternatives
? Selecting the preferred alternative
? Developing an action/implementation plan
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:
? What appears to be the problem(s) here?
? 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.
? 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 another time (preferably by someone else!).
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:
? profitability,
? strategic direction of the company,
? source of competitive advantage,
? morale of the company's employees, and/or
? customer satisfaction.
The problem statement may be framed as a question, e.g.: What should Joe do? or How can Mr. Smith improve market share? Usually the problem statement has to be re-written several times during the analysis of a case, as you peel back the layers of symptoms or causation.
Analyzing Case Data
In analyzing the case data, you are trying to answer the following:
? 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:
? resources, such as materials, equipment, or supplies, and
? people who transform these resources using
? processes, which creates something of greater value.
? Now, where are the problems being caused within this framework, and why?
? 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.
? 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.
? 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.
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:
? 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.
? The alternatives should be mutually exclusive, that is, they cannot happen at the same time.
? 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.
? 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.
? 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.
? 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.
Key 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:
? fit
? price
? fashion
? color
? approval of friend/family
? availability
Note that any one of these criteria could appropriately finish the sentence; the brand/style that I choose to purchase must.... These criteria are also how you will define or determine that a successful purchase decision has been made. For a business situation, the key decision criteria are those things that are important to the organization making the decision, and they will be used to evaluate the suitability of each alternative recommended.
Key decision criteria should be:
? Brief, preferably in point form, such as
? improve (or at least maintain) profitability,
? increase sales, market share, or return on investment,
? maintain customer satisfaction, corporate image,
? be consistent with the corporate mission or strategy,
? within our present (or future) resources and capabilities,
? within acceptable risk parameters,
? ease or speed of implementation,
? employee morale, safety, or turnover,
? retain flexibility, and/or
? minimize environmental impact.
? 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.
Students tend to find the concept of key decision criteria very confusing, so you will probably find that you re-write them several times as you analyze the case. They are similar to constraints or limitations, but are used to evaluate alternatives.
Evaluation of 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.
Recommendation
You must have one! Business people are decision-makers; this is your opportunity to practice making decisions. Give a justification for your decision (use the KDC's). 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.
Structure of the Written Report
Different Instructors will require different formats for case reports, but they should all have roughly the same general content. For example, the report may have the following sections in this order:
? Title Page
? Executive Summary
? Problem (Issue/Opportunity) Statement
? Supporting Evidence / Data Analysis
? Key Decision Criteria
? Alternatives Analysis
? Recommendations
? Action And Implementation Plan
? Exhibits
Notes on Written Reports:
? Always remember that you will be judged by the quality of your work, which includes your written work such as case study reports. To ensure the quality of your written work, keep the following in mind when writing your report:
? Proof-read your work! Not just on the screen while you write it, but the final copy after it is completed. Fix the errors before submitting.
? Use spell checker to eliminate spelling errors.
? Use grammar checking to avoid common grammatical errors such as run on sentences.
? Note that restating of case facts is not included in the format of the case report, nor is it considered part of analysis. Anyone reading your report will be familiar with the case, and you need only to mention facts that are relevant to (and support) your analysis or recommendation as you need them.
? If you are going to include exhibits (particularly numbers) in your report, you will need to refer to them within the body of your report, not just tack them on at the end! This reference should be in the form of supporting conclusions that you are making in your analysis. The reader should not have to guess why particular exhibits have been included, nor what they mean. If you do not plan to refer to them, then leave them out.
? Write in a formal manner suitable for scholarly work, rather than a letter to a friend.
? Proof-read your work! Have someone else read it too! This second pair of eyes will give you an objective opinion of how well your report holds together.
What is required for this exercise?
First of all, analyze the case to fully familiarize yourself with all key elements.
Next, collaborate with your group, analyze and then discuss the case in the context of classic case analysis methodology above. As a group, you should be able to identify a number of key strategic issues/opportunities.
Collectively, allocate issues as you choose. Each group member should address one issue and develop an appropriate recommendation. Basically, your individual report should follow an abbreviated structure such as:
? Executive Summary
? Problem (Issue/Opportunity) Statement
? Supporting Evidence
? Key Decision Criteria
? Recommendation/s
Your audience is the CEO (or equivalent).
As a group consulting team, collectively your recommendations/reports should be somewhat aligned. Negotiate a shared vision of anticipated outcomes and craft your report toward relatively common aims. Your individual report should reflect your views, but your collective vision should reflect similar aims for the client.
Please be sure to identify the group participants in each individual report.
