MBA Case Competition Prep Template

Case Competition Plan: [Competition name and year]

A preparation plan for MBA case competitions: forming the team, planning the hours of a 24-hour competition or the weeks of a multi-week one, building an analysis workplan, writing the deck storyline, preparing for judges' questions, and understanding how judging usually works. It includes worksheets with Example rows, an hour-by-hour 24-hour timeline, a week-by-week plan, a ghost-deck template, a Q&A bank, an example judging scorecard and a post-competition review. It is for MBA students entering internal, regional or international case competitions, and for faculty or club coaches. Source basis: team research (Tuckman 1965; Hackman 2002; Edmondson 1999; Woolley et al. 2010), structured communication practice (the pyramid principle described by Minto) and general competition practice, written in our own words. Replace every [bracketed] value and every row marked Example. The competition's own rules always override this plan.

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Contents

1. What case competitions test
2. Rules, eligibility and ethics
3. Team formation
4. Process overview
5. Timeline for a 24-hour competition
6. Timeline for a multi-week competition
7. Analysis workplan
8. Deck storyline
9. Q&A preparation
10. Judging criteria
11. Rehearsal and delivery
12. Post-competition review
13. Common mistakes
14. Self-test

1. What case competitions test

A case competition gives teams of three to five students a business problem, often sponsored by a company, and a fixed time to analyse it and present a recommendation to a panel of judges. Formats range from a few hours to several weeks; finals are usually live presentations followed by questions. The skills tested are the ones a strategy or general-management role uses every day: structuring an ambiguous problem, prioritising analysis under time pressure, reaching a clear recommendation, quantifying its impact, planning implementation, and defending the reasoning under challenge.

Competitions differ from a course case in three ways. First, the sponsor often provides real or realistic data and expects recommendations it could act on, so feasibility matters more. Second, delivery counts: judges see many decks and remember the teams that were clear, confident and well rehearsed. Third, the Q&A often decides close rankings, because it shows whether the team understands its own analysis or only presented it.

2. Rules, eligibility and ethics

Rules on outside help and on generative AI vary between competitions and change from year to year; some organisers publish an explicit AI rule, and some require disclosure. Read the current rules for your competition, do not assume last year's apply, and disclose any use the rules ask you to disclose. Treat sponsor data as confidential: do not post it, share it with other teams or reuse it after the event without permission.

3. Team formation

Team performance depends less on the average talent of members than on how the group works together: turn-taking in conversation and social perceptiveness predicted group performance across tasks in one well-known study (Woolley et al. 2010), and teams learn more when members feel safe to raise doubts and admit mistakes (Edmondson 1999). Hackman (2002) names five conditions for team effectiveness: a real team (clear membership, interdependent work), a compelling direction, an enabling structure (task design, the right size and mix, clear norms of conduct), a supportive context (resources, information, rewards) and expert coaching. For a competition team, the three you control most directly are direction, structure and coaching.

Skills matrix (score 1 to 3; aim for at least one 3 in every row):

Roles (one owner each; everyone still analyses):

Agree norms before the case drops: how you decide when you disagree, sleep rules, how you give feedback (use mba/mba-learning-team-charter and mba/mba-peer-feedback). New teams pass through forming, storming, norming and performing (Tuckman 1965); a practice case two or three weeks before the event moves the storming phase out of the competition itself.

4. Process overview

Every format follows the same loop: define the problem, form hypotheses, test them with focused analysis, and reach a one-sentence answer at a synthesis checkpoint before any slide is built. If the checkpoint fails, the team goes back to the issue tree rather than forward to the deck.

5. Timeline for a 24-hour competition

The blocks sum to 24.0 hours; the two analysis blocks (3 and 5, the second shared with the ghost deck) take 8.5 hours, or 35.4% of the time (computed in the calc file). Teams that spend more than half the time on analysis usually run out of time for the storyline and the dry runs, which carry a large share of the judging weight.

6. Timeline for a multi-week competition

7. Analysis workplan

Problem statement. [What decision must the sponsor make, by when, measured by which success metric?]

Issue tree (example structure). The question "How can [Company] grow revenue by [x]% in [y] years?" splits into mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive branches: grow the core (more customers, more spend per customer, better retention), expand (new segments, new geographies, new products) and acquire or partner.

Check-ins every two hours (24-hour format) or twice a week (multi-week format): each owner says what they found, what it means for the answer and what they need. The captain kills or adds analyses at each check-in.

8. Deck storyline

Structure the opening as situation, complication and resolution, and the deck as a pyramid: the answer first, then three supporting arguments, each backed by evidence, the approach Minto describes in The Pyramid Principle.

Ghost deck (titles are full-sentence takeaways):

Talk time budget for a 15-minute presentation (computed in the calc file; adjust to your limit):

9. Q&A preparation

Typical question categories and examples:

Answering technique: answer first in one sentence, give the reason or number, refer to a backup slide if useful, then stop. If you do not know, say what you would need to find out and how it would change the answer. Hand over explicitly ("Priya built the model, she can take that") rather than having two people answer at once. Never contradict a teammate in front of the judges; build on the answer instead.

10. Judging criteria

Most competitions judge some combination of the following, often on a 1 to 10 scale per criterion:

Example scoring by one judge (computed in the calc file): Team 1 scores 8, 7, 8, 6, 9, 7 and Team 2 scores 7, 9, 7, 8, 7, 8 on the six criteria. Weighted scores: Team 1 = 7.35, Team 2 = 7.80 out of 10 (Excel: =SUMPRODUCT($B$2:$B$7,C2:C7)). Team 1 presented better, but Team 2 leads by two points on analysis (25%) and on implementation (20%), worth 0.90 weighted points, more than Team 1's leads elsewhere: polish does not make up for a thin plan.

Judges are often executives from the sponsor, consultants and faculty. Sponsor executives tend to probe feasibility and fit with their constraints; consultants probe structure and numbers; faculty probe the logic and the use of frameworks. Prepare for all three.

11. Rehearsal and delivery

• Each presenter owns a section and transitions by handing over the next point, not by saying "next slide".
• Rehearse the first 60 seconds word for word; it sets the judges' first impression of clarity.
• Keep 30 seconds of margin under the time limit; judges notice overruns and some competitions cut presenters off.
• Number check before submission: every figure on a slide matches the model, units on every chart, totals that add up.
• Logistics: file format and name, fonts embedded, adapter for the room, a printed copy, a backup on a second device.
• Dress and conduct: follow the organiser's guidance; thank the sponsor; be courteous to other teams.

Dry-run log:

12. Post-competition review

13. Common mistakes

1. Boiling the ocean. Analysing everything instead of the few analyses that could change the answer.
2. No answer until the last night. Without a one-sentence answer at the checkpoint, the deck becomes a list of findings.
3. Descriptive slide titles ("Market overview") that force judges to work out the point.
4. A creative idea the sponsor cannot execute. Judges from the sponsor discount ideas outside its capabilities or budget.
5. Financials as an afterthought. No credible numbers for cost, revenue impact and payback, or numbers on slides that do not match the model.
6. No sensitivity. Judges ask what happens if the key assumption is wrong; the team has no answer.
7. Skipping sleep. Error rates in the final hours rise sharply for exhausted teams.
8. Untimed rehearsal. Overrunning the limit or rushing the recommendation because the analysis section ran long.
9. Unassigned Q&A. Two people answer at once, or nobody does.
10. Rules missed. Outside help, outside data or AI use beyond what the rules allow, or a late or oversized file.
11. One person does all the talking in a format where judges expect the whole team to present.

14. Self-test

1. Name the five team roles in section 3 and say which one owns the one-sentence answer.
2. In the 24-hour plan, what happens at T+08:00 and why is it placed there?
3. Why should every analysis in the workplan be linked to a hypothesis?
4. Rewrite the slide title "Financial analysis" as a takeaway title for a plan with NPV USD 12m and payback 2.5 years.
5. Compute Team 1's weighted score from section 10 and explain why it loses to Team 2.
6. A judge asks a question nobody prepared for. Describe a good answer structure.
7. Name Hackman's (2002) five conditions for team effectiveness, and the three a competition team controls most directly.
8. Name two rules you must check before using generative AI tools in a competition.

Sources and further reading

• Tuckman, B. W. (1965). Developmental sequence in small groups. Psychological Bulletin, 63(6), 384-399.
• Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383.
• Woolley, A. W., Chabris, C. F., Pentland, A., Hashmi, N., and Malone, T. W. (2010). Evidence for a collective intelligence factor in the performance of human groups. Science, 330(6004), 686-688.
• Hackman, J. R. (2002). Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performances. Harvard Business School Press.
• Further reading (by name only): Minto, B., The Pyramid Principle: Logic in Writing and Thinking; Belbin, R. M., Management Teams: Why They Succeed or Fail; Duarte, N., Resonate.
• In this library: mba/mba-case-write-up for written analysis, mba/mba-case-interview-prep and mba/mba-market-sizing-drills for structuring practice, mba/mba-npv-irr-card for the financial case.

Answer key

1. Captain, storyline owner, model owner, deck owner, Q&A owner. The storyline owner owns the one-sentence answer (the captain makes the final call if the team is split).
2. The synthesis checkpoint. It comes after the first analysis sprint, early enough that the ghost deck and the second sprint can focus on the gaps in the answer.
3. Because only analyses that could change the recommendation are worth the time; hypotheses make that test explicit and let the captain cut the rest.
4. For example: "The plan returns USD 12m NPV and pays back in 2.5 years."
5. 0.15 x 8 + 0.25 x 7 + 0.20 x 8 + 0.20 x 6 + 0.10 x 9 + 0.10 x 7 = 7.35. Team 2 scores 7.80. Team 2's two-point leads on analysis (25%) and implementation and financials (20%) are worth 0.50 + 0.40 = 0.90, plus 0.10 on Q&A; Team 1's leads on problem understanding, recommendation and delivery are worth only 0.15 + 0.20 + 0.20 = 0.55. Net difference 0.45.
6. Acknowledge the question, answer with what you know in one sentence, state what you would need to find out and how it could change the recommendation, then stop.
7. A real team, a compelling direction, an enabling structure, a supportive context and expert coaching; the team controls direction, structure (size, mix, norms) and coaching most directly.
8. Any two of: whether AI tools are allowed at all, for which tasks, whether use must be disclosed, and whether the sponsor's confidential data may be entered into a tool.

Revision history

Standard and licence note

Based on published research on team development and effectiveness (Tuckman 1965; Edmondson 1999; Hackman 2002; Woolley et al. 2010) and on general structured-communication and case-competition practice, summarised in original wording. The timelines, worksheets, judging scorecard and examples are original and written for this collection; they describe common practice and are not the rules of any competition, school or sponsor, and the template is not affiliated with or endorsed by any of them. All names and figures in the examples are fictional. Check the current rules of your competition before use. Template licence: MIT.