Prerequisite: The density of material establishes an aggressive pace in the presentation of content. Statistical background is helpful, but not required.

Course Outline

This course will prepare functional managers and organizational practitioners to finally make sense of data analytics and take control of the analytics process. The “Data Analytics Bootcamp” develops core skills for goal-driven analytics and lays the foundation for data-intensive analytics projects that deliver insight, clarity, confidence, and sound decision support.

Attendees will learn the four major types of problems encountered in commercial and public sector applications and walk through a structured development process to grasp key issues they will face for each problem type. Unlike any other analytics or statistical training, this course maintains a decision strategy focus supported by work-along exercises. The exercises allow attendees to experience and organize the natural messiness of data analytics while reinforcing the skills to effectively drive their own projects. Participants return with a rich set of course notes, an analytics process guide, exercise session files, and follow-on resources.

This course builds core capabilities for those who are new to data analytics, provides a more functional, streamlined, and strategic mindset for those with classical statistical training, and serves as a structured platform for those wishing to proceed into more advanced analytics projects with greater confidence.

You Will Learn To

• Discover, monitor, and clearly report the primary analytics contributors that affect strategic decision processes and their impact on performance metrics that are important to leadership
• Classify the four major types of analysis projects and match the best-suited core analytics methods
• Experience a seven-phase Modeling Practice Framework™ for evaluating and validating organizational insights
• Structure and organize a wide range of data analysis topics from a project-oriented, decision-process perspective
• Identify critical characteristics of available data fields and leverage treatments to significantly enhance their contribution to the decision-making process
• Observe a structured process to evaluate the effectiveness of individual attributes and their value to enhancing a predefined objective
• Establish a solid foundation for more advanced analytics practices such as predictive modeling and data mining

Geared To

The “Data Analytics Bootcamp” is suited for the following roles:

• Functional managers who desire a practical appreciation of core analytics methods in a fast-paced, impact-focused course in order to interact more effectively with analysts and IT staff on departmental data analysis projects, regardless of their prior statistical background
• Business analysts who need to transform their quantitative capabilities into a purposeful approach to impactful prescriptive analytics by letting go of ad hoc statistical techniques and focusing specifically on a framework of core strategies most appropriate for tackling common business problems
• Experienced statisticians who may be statistical wizards at the quantitative level, but realize they will be far more valuable to the organization upon learning how to adapt their classical training into a more goal-driven mindset for streamlined, agile, and targeted data analytics that translate effectively into measurable impact for leadership
• IT specialists who wish to gain a better appreciation of the overall analytics process in order to more effectively prepare resources for data analysis and integrate resulting decision models within the infrastructure of today’s sophisticated data storage and access environments
• Business intelligence team members who realize they need to take a step back and reinforce their essential core analytics capabilities in order to gain solid traction when proceeding into more advanced analytics fields such as data mining, predictive modeling, machine learning, knowledge discovery, unstructured text analysis, and data-driven decision support