Case Challenge

This weekend I was able to be a part of a really fun competition. One of the large consulting firms sponsored a case challenge competition at the Heinz College. This post is all about how the competition worked and how the team I was on did. I’ve written a lengthy reflection here, so if you just want to know how we did you can jump to the end.
The competition worked like this.

Thursday evening at about 6:00pm they issued the case. Teams have a little more than 36 hours to go through the case, figure out how they will approach it, and come up with a solution.
Saturday morning at 8:00 am teams must turn in electronic copy of their PowerPoint presentation that will be used for presenting to the judges.
Teams a randomly split up into 5 rooms, 5 teams each room. One at a time each team presents to a panel of judges (who were role playing people in the case), no other teams are present. The team has 20 minutes to present their solution and 10 minutes to answer questions, and defend their solution. This lasts until about noon Saturday.

After lunch, the 'Top 5' is announced, which is the best team from each room. Those teams receive a 'twist’ or new development in the scenario and had one hour to adjust their solution and presentation.
Each 'Top 5' team then presents their adapted solution to a new panel of judges, answers questions, and defends their new solution with the same time restrictions as the first round. Eliminated teams, and other top 5 teams who have already presented their solution can sit in on the presentation, but can't ask questions.

Finally, they pick the best team.

At each stage the team is evaluated on how they approached the problem, the solution, the presentation (the actual PowerPoint slides), presentation skills, and their ability and skill at answering questions and defending their choices.

This makes for a long 48 hours if you go all the way through the competition. The environment is very competitive as everyone is motivated by the prestige of winning a competition sponsored and judged by a high end consulting firm and also the lucrative prize of $500/team member for first place; $250/team member for second; $150/team member for third place, and a bunch of nice prizes for the fourth and fifth team.

They only accept 25 teams, each team with 4 members, into the competition. It is surprisingly difficult to get in because of the aforementioned incentives.

I was approached by one of my Indian friends to be a part of the team he was putting together. I was hesitant to accept since it was conference weekend. However, he is a great guy and we work well together, but don't have the chance to do so very often (we tried doing a coding competition last year that did not end up going so well). I also wanted the experience so I accepted. The other two team members I had never met before Thursday night. They were both great guys and we are all great friends now. We were one of the lucky teams that got in.

The case was a real life problem the firm had worked on with a few of the details changed. It involved a terrorist attack in the United States and the setting up of a new government agency. We were tasked with outlining and creating the plan to get the organization up and running quickly and efficiently taking into account a bunch of small details.

We didn't take the all nighter approach. Both nights we were done by about 11:00pm. We put in a lot of intense hours on Friday, but by 10:00 pm we were pretty much done. Saturday morning we made a few tweaks and turned it in. We were the last group to present in our room and weren't sure what to expect, they didn't have too many difficult questions for us.

We made the 'Top 5'. The hour we had to work on the twist was probably one of the fastest hours I have experienced in a long time, but our first solution was set up well for the twist so we felt good about our adapted solution. We were second to last to present, so the 3 other teams before us and a few other students were in on our presentation.

It was going well, until I got up to present my part. I was talking and suddenly my train of thought was interrupted mid-sentence and I lost what I was about to say. There was an awkward silence in the room. My mind switched to crisis mode, what was I trying to say, why couldn't I think of it. I glanced up at the slide behind me to try and get my thought back, no luck. Thoughts like, 'oh, no! I blew it for the team', and 'I can't believe this just happened' started going through my mind. I was able to keep my anxiety down and stay calm, and eventually started talking again picking up on the last point I remembered talking about, suddenly I remembered what I was going to say. I was so relieved. Even with my pause, which probably wasn't as long it felt, we finished in our 20 min. limit.

Naturally, the second round of judges had tougher questions and was a little more aggressive. We had prepared ourselves well and we all participated in the Q&A.

We had to sit through one presentation then wait for about 30 minutes while the judges debated the rankings. They then presented the solution the firm used on the actually engagement, which was much more detailed and comprehensive than what any of us had come up with.

They announced the winners from 5th to 1st. After the 5th and 4th positions were announced and our team hadn't been announced, we all looked at each other surprised. 3rd, still not us, my mind was going crazy and my heart starting to beat. 2nd, another team, we looked at each other with awe. 1st place... The Jaguars, our team.

Wow. What a rush and how exciting. None of us could believe it. The craziest thing about it all, and this would be true even if we hadn't won, I kind of liked the whole process and really enjoyed doing it.

Some thoughts I had. It really seemed to be more about how you thought about the problem and how you were able to present that, rather than what you came up with. I guess that’s how it is in the real world. It doesn't matter if you have the best solution in the world, if you can’t communicate it people won’t appreciate it and accept it, it won't get anywhere.