"The Decision-Making Tools course has given me a new perspective on data analysis and its visualization"

From 11 until 18 July the third Executive MBA module of the year took place - the Business Research Tools module consisting of the courses Research Methods and Decision-Making Tools. Due to the current circumstances both courses were taught via distance learning.

Research Methods and Decision-Making Tools are important courses for the final assessment of the Executive MBA program. The final assessment can either be a business plan, a consulting project or an academic research. For all options, strong knowledge on how to do thorough research, how to analyze the results and on making thought-out decisions are instrumental..

The first four days focused on research methods, taught by Dr. Terry Kakeeto-Aelen. During this course the steps of finding a topic for the final assessment, research design, conducting research, how to use primary and secondary data and writing the final assessment were discussed in depth.

Decision-Making Tools

The Decision Making Tools course is designed to provide the basic tools for collecting, analyzing, interpreting, and presenting data and for basing decisions on the data. “Decision Making Tools is an interesting course which I personally enjoyed. Although anything that has to do with statistics and logic are always a bit difficult for non-math based students, Dr. Vincent Feltkamp taught it quite well”, says Ugwunna Nnamdi Iwuagwu.

Business managers have to make decisions based on what is expected to happen to important business aspects such as demand, costs and profits. These decisions are an effort to shape the future of the organization. If managers make no effort to look at the past and extrapolate this into the future, the likelihood of achieving success is slim. Engineer Muhammad Adeel Awan has a lot of experience in working with data. Nevertheless he believes that the provided tools will be helpful for him in the future. "The Decision-Making Tools course has given me a new perspective about data analysis and its visualization," he says.

The course takes a look into a number of mathematical tools that can assist managers in the decision-making process. The goal of this course is not to turn students into accomplished statisticians but to give some appreciation of statistical techniques. These techniques can help to determine if data and its analysis that has been given or read in literature is of value.

The students actively put theory into practice by working on a group assignment were statistical tools such as Tableau and RealStatistics were used to analyze and present data.

For Ugwunna, this course was very handy as he is currently leading a small team within his organization responsible for statistical process control. “We are still building and I can apply the tools we learnt in this course directly to my work," he explains.