Reading the case for role and task

Five things to read a brief for

Before any analysis, a case brief is read for five facts: role (who am I?), audience (who am I writing to, and what is their position?), task (what exactly did they ask?), deadline, and form (memo, email, report, presentation). All five are usually in the first two paragraphs, and all five change what a good answer looks like. The stage-1 rubric this course uses — R-psp-1, a Memra rubric that mirrors the stage criteria the open sources agree on (the official SAF rubrics are not public) — opens with role and task named, and a case response that gets them wrong is answering a different question from the one asked.

Worked example — Lakeshore Print Co.

This is the running case for modules 4 to 10. The brief, as your firm received it:

> Lakeshore Print Co. is a commercial printer in Burlington, Ontario, owned by Priya Raman, with six staff and revenue of about $1.4 million. Its nine-year-old digital press broke down fourteen times last year; repairs cost $38,000, up from $9,000 three years ago, and on-time delivery has fallen from 96 % to 84 %. Two of the three key accounts have threatened to move their work. Priya has asked Wren Advisory for a recommendation memo, by 15 November, on what to do about the press. You are the junior analyst assigned to the file.

Read it for the five:

• Role: junior analyst at Wren Advisory — an outside adviser, not an employee of Lakeshore and not the decision-maker. (Found in the last sentence.)
• Audience: Priya Raman, owner — the person who decides and who pays; she knows her business better than you do and does not need it explained back to her. (Sentence one.)
• Task: recommend what to do about the press. Not "analyse the company", not "fix on-time delivery", not "decide whether to sell the business" — those are broader or different questions. (Sentence four.)
• Deadline: 15 November. (Sentence four.)
• Form: a memo. (Sentence four.)

Now watch how the role changes the writing. An outside junior analyst writing to the owner means: formal register; the recommendation must be argued from evidence Priya can check, because she will; the depth is what a decision needs, not everything you learned; and "done" means a memo she can act on by the 15th — not a study. If the role had been Lakeshore's own bookkeeper writing to Priya, the register would be less formal, the context lines could be shorter, and the recommendation would carry the weight of someone who will live with it.

Extract the five from a second brief

> Grand River Family Dental, a two-dentist clinic in Waterloo, has used a paper appointment book and a phone line for eleven years. The office manager, Tomas Reyes, says missed appointments run at about 12 % and that two patients last month were double-booked. He has asked you, a co-op student in the practice-management consultancy that does the clinic's bookkeeping, for a short email by next Friday on whether the clinic should switch to online booking software, and if so which kind.

Role: co-op student at the consultancy (outside adviser, junior). Audience: Tomas Reyes, office manager — not the dentists, who own the clinic; he runs the front desk and will implement whatever is chosen. Task: whether to switch to booking software, and if so which kind — two questions, both asked. Deadline: next Friday. Form: a short email. The two context facts that matter: 12 % missed appointments; double-bookings occurring. Nothing is recommended yet.

The two ways this goes wrong

Answering a broader question — writing Priya a review of Lakeshore's strategy when she asked about a press — is a failure of task identification, and it costs the stage-1 line and most of the reader's patience. Deciding the form yourself — sending a report when an email was asked for, because you had more to say — is the same error from the other side: the brief sets the form in stage 1, and stage 5 delivers in it.