Friday, September 5, 2008

Framework to answer all work related questions

The following tip was provided by Sumit Dhar [A Current ISB Student].

Well, here is a framework that will help the prospective students answer all work related questions in a very structured manner. The framework is called START.

Every work related question and quite a few behavioral questions can be answered using the START framework. What exactly is the START framework?

S: Situation
Start by giving some information about the situation you were facing. This could be background information that will help the AdCom understand your position better or information that is vital to understanding why you did something.

T: Tasks
Given the situation, what tasks needed to be done?

A: Actions
What actions did you take? Tasks is the universal set of things that needed to be done while Actions is the subset that you performed.

R: Results
Based on the actions you took, what happened? What were the improvements? Usually improvements are in terms of cost, efficiency, greater customer satisfaction etc.

T: Takeaways
What were your key takeaways from this experience?

Practice using the START framework. Your answers will be crisp, structured and to the point.

No comments: