Of Data Mining and its Challenges

 

BY FAR THE MOST DIFFICULT TASK since I started to work as a consultant is to extract RELIABLE data from the client. A typical engagement would start with a kick’-off meeting with your well-groomed team of consultants and the client’s people. All ready to tackle the problem that your firm has been hired to figure out. Because you have been thoroughly trained in Consulting 101, you hypothesized about the problem, broke down the issue into pieces and re-arrange everything into a cohesive, logical structure. Pfiu, that was the hard part, now let’s just get some data to confront our hypothesis and we can keep the ball rolling. Well, bad news. The “mundane” task of gathering data is not easy. It is not even mildly difficult. It is VERY HARD.

A Tale of Two Trees

Photo Credit: zachstern via Compfight cc

Those of you who follow this blog – despite the anaemic posting frequency – you would have notice that I still haven’t finished explaining the totality of the Case Interview Process Model©. There is actually a good reason for this.

New Social Event this April

Dear All,

If you happen to be in Singapore at this date and interested in meeting up with like-minded people who are into consulting, why not pop by and have a chat!

Nearest MRT is Tiong Bahru which is north west of this well-known coffee enthusiasts cafe in Singapore.

Hope to see you the 12th of April!

Introducing the Case Interview Process Model© - Part 2: Hypothesis & Structure

This post follows the first part of the Case Interview Process Model, where we discussed the goal of the maps and how to open a case.

First of all, my sincere apologies to post the second part this late. The combination of interviews, quitting a job and devoting time to charity has been has been overwhelming. Yet, this is not an excuse, because as we shall learn when working in consulting, great performance is a function of discipline, and discipline only. I obviously lacked it during those three months :) On that note, let's get started!

(Click to enlarge)

In today's post, we will focus on the first two steps of the Analyze Case sub-process: Define Initial Hypothesis and Structure Hypothesis. Those tasks are the bulk of a case study so they need to be discussed at length. You can quickly observe that the map describing Analyze Case is substantially larger than the one used in Open Case. This is obviously explained by the fact that actual work to solve the problem is done in Analyze Case.

Introducing the Case Interview Process Model© - Part 1

This post is the first part of describing the Case Interview Process Model©. The second part will come shortly after, and I'll promise it'll be even better.

If you have read some of my previous posts, you know that I take a lot of my case interview philosophy from Victor Cheng, they guy behind the wildly successful site caseinterview.com. One of Victor's core principles is that successful consultants follow a logic, linear thinking which ultimately lead them to a solution of the problem. Similarly, candidates in case interview are expected to display the same consistency of though, so that interviewers are confident that the candidate does possess the skills to success, and didn't just get lucky.

A Process Perspective

As it turns out, the thought pattern promulgated by Victor Cheng is so systematic, so linear, that a very good way to describe it is using process modeling. Despite its rather dreadful name (it was originally invented by IT folks), process modeling is very simple at its core: it visually lays out a sequence of activities triggered by a specific event. No more, no less.

Since a process is a well-defined collection of discreet activities, it is just perfect to describe a logical and linear set of tasks. Yes, just like the case interview ;-)

I therefore here suggest a possible process-centric view on business case interviews, as taught by Victor Cheng. The process is modeled using the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), which has become the industry's standard. The BPMN model presented here follows the Method and Style convention of BPMN's guru Bruce Silver. No worries, you won't need to buy the book to understand the model, we are going to walk along it together.

I haven't came across any modeling of this sort on the web so I believe this is a rather original view to bring to the case interview methodology. The process is far from being perfect and I actually love to hear your suggestions about how to make it better.

So let's all buckle up and put our nose into the wonderful world of the Case Interview Process Model©. It's going to be fun.