Prakhar Jain

My preparation started with a session held by CRUX which gave it a foundation on how to go about solving cases and the basic approaches to take. Following that, I went through different types of frameworks from IIM-A and CRUX casebooks which gave me a rough outline of different problems and industries as a whole. The best way to go about a case is to have it monitored by someone. We formed a group of 4 where we administered cases each day for each other. This not only gives you a real-time simulation environment but also helps you analyze the problem at hand from different perspectives. It helped me immensely in understanding different types of scoping questions relevant to a case and gave my solution a better structure altogether.

Analysis of your solution is the next step. I scrutinized each case I did and analyzed if there could have been a better or alternative solution to the problem and how I could have reached it more efficiently. At last, take help from your seniors. I booked slots to have mock cases with seniors which gave me a deeper insight into them through their experience. Finally, be consistent with the cases and be confident on D-day.

The interview starts right from the moment you get your buddies allocated. It's important you reach out to them regularly and practice cases with them. I had 6 buddy rounds for IMU and CN. Initial rounds were more or less introductory sessions where they get to know about you and have basic guesstimates. In the further rounds, I was given cases on market entry, market growth, and M&A frameworks, which was kind of unexpected as going by the past experience of seniors, Accenture strategy majorly takes cases from profitability framework during their interview.

The last of my buddy calls were managing director rounds from both IMU and CN where they asked more about my interests and why I wanted to work with Accenture. On D-day, I had one managing director round for both CN and IMU. They were more of BQ rounds where they asked more about my past experience and my future goals. There weren't any cases in those rounds.

If anything, I would have given more time to analyse the cases. Due to time constraints, that is where I believe I lagged a bit. Analysing them gives you deeper insight into the problem at hand and the industry as whole. It let's you look at the problem again with a different perspective of thought and helps to inspect how you could have reached the solution more efficiently or come up with more alternative solutions. Solving cases is more about the flow of a structured thought than following a fixed framework. Analysing the cases helped be build that flow and gave my solutions a more in-depth analytical touch.