From Finance to International Development, Impact Investment to Healthcare Consulting, various Universities and Business Schools host a variety of Case competitions that allow MBA students to use their newly-acquired learning in solving real-life business problems within a short period.
A 4-member team from University of Oxford Said Business School comprising Marla Woodward, Charlotte Kirby Thomson, Neetu Puranikmath and Arpit Jain, recently won a case competition at the Yale School of Management in the US. Writing on the school blog, Marla and Charlotte, share some tips and insights on how to meet the challenge.
The first step, according to them, is building a team with the right composition. Since the Yale case competition dealt with strategy, they needed to have expertise in a wide range of business functions.
“We had team members with marketing, technology, operations, and administrative functional experience. If we could have had a 5th team member, we would have gone for a former finance professional as well.
The third point is about fixing roles and responsibilities in advance. Discuss as a group your strengths and weaknesses to understand how to assign roles and responsibilities.
“For a finance competition, on the other hand, having a heavier balance of finance professionals is definitely recommended,” they said.
Geographic diversity is also important so that the team has a higher chance of having had personal experience in the relevant markets for the case along with gender diversity for better decision-making. In this instance, the team had members with experience in India, the USA and foreign entry into China that worked well for finding solutions.
The second point is about talking with your team members on what exactly each one of them wants to get from the competition. Does someone want to take care of the financial analysis part or the presentation or for networking? Make sure everyone is aware of individual goals up front. You can’t always control who wins, but you can control what your team gets out of the experience.
The third point is about fixing roles and responsibilities in advance. Discuss as a group your strengths and weaknesses to understand how to assign roles and responsibilities.
Ideally, the team members should have, among themselves, people good at creative brainstorming and problem solving; someone with a strong command of strategy frameworks; Financial analysis;
Time manager/whip-cracker; someone to take care of Presentation design; an expert in Visual and written communication and Presentation speaker(s).
The fourth point is about having a decision-making process. You may get hardly 1.5 hours to finish your presentation. If there are differences between team members at this juncture, precious time may be wasted in sorting it that out.
The said team agreed on an established leader and a process. It was decided to have a verbal agreement to decisions out loud (to avoid high energy people thinking they have an agreement and bulldozing on without stopping and listening to introverts, who often have great feedback but might not speak up)
If not unanimous, then all members vote and in the event of a tie, the leader makes the final call. This could vary according to the teams and situations.
The fifth point is on the importance of a time management strategy as it could make or break a case competition presentation. A timeline for approaching the case should be drawn up for the research phase and to start working on your presentation. If you have a case with a lot of material, you may not be able to read everything. So stick to your timeline.
The sixth point is about having a variety of blank templates. In the case of financial templates, company valuation and project valuation with discounted cash flows would be great.
PowerPoint templates should have both slide designs and content outlines with a presentation flow (also some good presentation slides and stock photography websites bookmarked, eg. www.canva.com and www.pexels.com)
In Strategy frameworks, it is recommended to take all of the frameworks from your core strategy class, put them all in PPT and bringing them along as analytical tools. External strategy frameworks (Porter’s 5 Forces, Ansoff’s Growth Matrix, PESTEL), as well as internal strategy frameworks (McKinsey or BCG matrix, Core Competencies, Porter’s value chain), may also be needed.