MSING014B: Decision and Risk Analysis

Aims

Important business decisions cannot be left to intuition alone. We need to communicate the structure of our reasoning, defend it to adversarial challenges and make presentations that show we have done a thorough analysis. We also need to make sense out of various sources of data, organise the inputs of experts and colleagues, and use state-of-the-art tools to provide analytical support to our reasoning. To equip you to be more effective in these tasks is the objective of this course. The emphasis is not on the quantitative aspects, but on the qualitative insights that come from using models to aid managerial thinking and decision making.

Objectives

By the end of this course you will be equipped with specific skills in the areas of:

  • data analysis
  • structuring decisions
  • building decision models
  • risk assessment
  • decision making under uncertainty
  • recognising areas where business analysis can add value, selecting appropriate types of analyses and applying them in a small-scale, quick-turnaround fashion.

This is a practical course, which uses state-of-the-art decision support software to illustrate how to apply the methodologies introduced. Therefore, the course consists of a mixture of lectures and computer workshops. The software used in the lectures and workshops is Microsoft Excel, with add-ins @Risk for simulation, PrecisionTree for decision analysis, and Solver for resource allocation. If you are not well versed in Excel, it would be a good idea to brush up your Excel skills before the course.