Business Case Study Interview Questions

If you are going to apply to a consulting company, it's very likely that they will give you a case study interview. This consists of giving you a problem and you trying to think and organize a solution.

Microsoft Tech Case Study Interview

• Design a kitchen for people in wheelchairs: Barrier Free Kitchen Design - good intuitive advice, must have enough space between the cabinets and island to manuever a wheelchair,
  • three basic activity centers: stove/cooktop/oven, fridge and freezer, sink/dishwasher
  • must have enough space between the cabinets and island to maneuver a wheelchair
  • must have lots of knee space! under the sink, preparation space
  • lowered countertops
  • cooktop controls should be mounted on the front
  • oven should be on the ground
  • cabinets should be on the ground, roll out cabinets
  • more storage space: lazy susan corner cabinets

Deloitte Case Interview Workshop notes

Business Case Interview

Skills needed to think through a Business Case:

• Logical/Analytical Thought process
• Communication
• Creativity
• Business insight
• Ability to sort through extraneous information
• Ability to come to a concise and clear recommendation
• Organizational skills
• Working under pressure

Types of Business Cases:

• Market Sizing: aka ESTIMATE! i.e. "How much paint would you need to paint a fleet of navy airships?"  
  • Example: "How many golf balls are made in the US per year?"
    1. What is the number of golfers in US? There are 250 million people in the US and let’s say 20% of them golf. That makes for 50 million golfers.
    2. What is the number of balls each golfer uses? Let’s say each golfer uses about 2-3 balls per round of golf.
    3. What is the number of rounds they play per year? Let’s say each golfer plays about 10 rounds per year.
    4. Therefore you have about 1,500,000,000 golf balls in the US
• General Business: analyze common business issues i.e. "Where should we relocate?"
  • Example: "We are a customer support call center for Blah Computers. Our costs are increasing, what should we do?"
    1. Some things to think about would be profit/loss margin, N-tier architecture, people costs, server costs (i.e. powering the servers themselves and the cooling A/C systems for the servers), resource leveling
    2. People costs: how much does it cost to maintain the servers with our people? Staffing issues: are they inexperienced, do they need better training, is it taking them too long to fix things, are they not happy with their jobs?
    3. Server issues: maybe we need to upgrade our servers to newer, faster better servers to reduce the number of servers it takes to solve a problem.
    4. Architecture issues: maybe the way the calls are being directed to the wrong people (i.e. better allocation of human resources), too much traffic to one specific group