Page 64 - The McKinsey Mind

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42 The McKinsey Mind

As you can see, Paul’s not in the least concerned that he will
never reach “the answer.” Rather, he’s merely trying to establish
upper and lower bounds for the size of this particular market,
because that range will be enough for him to decide whether to
pursue this project.

IMPLEMENTATION GUIDANCE
When designing your analysis, you have a specific end product in
mind: your work plan. A comprehensive work plan begins with
all the issues and subissues you identified during the framing of
your initial hypothesis. For each issue or subissue, you should list
the following elements:

• Your initial hypothesis as to the answer
• The analyses that must be done to prove or disprove that
hypothesis, in order of priority
• The data necessary to perform the analysis
• The likely sources of the data (e.g., Census data, focus
groups, interviews)
• A brief description of the likely end product of each analysis
• The person responsible for each end product (you or a
member of your team)
• The due date for each end product

It doesn’t need to be fancy or formal. Hand-drawn is fine, as
long as it’s legible.
As an example, let’s return once more to Acme Widgets. When
we left your team there in the last chapter, you had just finished
your issue tree. We spent some time expanding one of the branches
of that tree—the issue of “Can we implement the necessary
changes?”—by dividing that issue into subissues expressed as
yes/no questions. Table 2-1 shows how you could lay out the work
plan for one of those subissues.