Philip’s Excel Reconstruction Project
Lipson, Marc L.;Zo...
Philip’s Excel Reconstruction Project
QA-0999 | Published August 14, 2026 | 3 Pages Case
Collection: Darden School of Business
Product Details
In this short case, designed as a hands-on Excel workshop, students step into the role of Philip Glavanic, an MBA student at his first summer internship at a large consulting firm. On his first project, he is asked to use an Excel-based financial model—built by a now-departed analyst—to answer three parametric questions about a set of competing investment projects. But the original model is nowhere to be found, and the only surviving record of it is a screenshot. Glavanic must reconstruct the model from the screenshot, then answer the questions using Excel’s What-If tools—primarily Goal Seek and a one-input Data Table. This fictional case has been used at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business as part of a prematriculation program for incoming first-year MBA students, where it is in a module focusing on Excel skills. It would equally serve in an introductory Excel modeling class, in a workshop session in a core finance or core quantitative-analysis course, or as a refresher in an executive-education setting for participants whose Excel skills have grown rusty since their junior days.
This is an introductory case on Excel model building. The main goal is to get students prepared for more difficult Excel modeling in upcoming coursework, and more broadly, in the associate-level work they will be expected to do in summer internships and full-time jobs in finance and consulting. Concretely, it pursues the following objectives: (1) Develop the practical Excel skill of building a discounted-cash-flow (DCF) model from scratch—distinguishing input cells from formula cells, laying out the time grid, and chaining the rows from revenue through earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT), net operating profit after taxes (NOPAT), and free cash flow (FCF)—so that students leave able to construct such a model under time pressure without copying a template. (2) Build comfort with Excel’s What-If analysis tools—Goal Seek for finding the value of one input that produces a target output, and one-input Data Tables for sensitivity analysis across a range of inputs—so that students reach for these tools by reflex when a manager asks a “what would it take to…” question. (3) Introduce or reinforce the standard financial-modeling vocabulary (revenue, EBIT, tax shield, NOPAT, depreciation, FCF, discount factor, net present value [NPV]) in a hands-on rather than textbook setting, so that students walk away with the muscle memory of having built these rows once. (4) Develop the consulting habit of decomposing a fuzzy ask into a short sequence of concrete subtasks—in this case, (1) reconstruct the model, (2) verify it against the screenshot, (3) use Goal Seek for the equal-NPV question, (4) use Goal Seek for the equal-payback question, and (5) use a Data Table plus a chart for the sensitivity question—so that students are not paralyzed by a deliverable described in one sentence.