Forming Analytical Questions
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Turn broad business questions into specific analytical questions and match each one to descriptive, diagnostic, predictive or prescriptive analytics.
Business questions such as how to price a new product or how to keep more customers come in different forms depending on their context and purpose. Turning a stakeholder’s request into a question an analysis can test is a translation step with its own challenges. You practice clarifying the need through conversation, rewriting it as a specific, measurable analytical question, and matching it to descriptive, diagnostic, predictive or prescriptive analytics.
What You Will Achieve
- Tell a broad business question apart from a well-formed analytical question you can act on
- Use communication practices with stakeholders to clarify what a business problem actually needs
- Rewrite a business need as a question that is specific, measurable, actionable, relevant, and time-bound
- Match a question to the kind of analytics it calls for and pick a technique that suits its context
Program Overview
Business Value and Analytical Questions
Sets out the workflow for getting value from analytics and why business questions need translating before any analysis starts.
- The value from analytics workflow
- Business versus analytical questions
- Classifying question types
- Common translation challenges and how to handle them
Forming Questions and Choosing Analytical Solutions
Covers understanding the business problem through communication, rephrasing it into a usable question and selecting a fitting technique.
- Communication practices for understanding the problem
- Forming and rephrasing analytical questions
- Types of analytical solutions
- Selecting the best technique
The Four Types of Analytics in Industry Use Cases
Works through descriptive, diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive questions, mapping each to a technique with examples in e-commerce, automotive, healthcare and banking.
- Descriptive questions: what happened
- Diagnostic questions: why it happened
- Predictive and prescriptive questions
- A question classification challenge
Certificate Awarded (Paid)
Job Outlook
These skills are used wherever analysts and data teams take requests from business stakeholders, including work in e-commerce, automotive, healthcare and banking.
Good for: Analysts and other staff who receive vague requests from managers and want a method for turning them into questions that data can answer.
Keep in mind: The course is non-technical: you classify questions and choose suitable techniques, but you do not run an analysis or write code.
Bottom line: A focused course on the step before analysis, with each of the four analytics types worked through as its own set of questions.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which industries do the examples come from?
The last chapter applies the method to business problems in e-commerce, automotive, healthcare and banking, showing how each problem becomes an analytical question and which solution suits it.
What does SMART mean for an analytical question?
SMART stands for specific, measurable, actionable, relevant and time-bound. The course uses these criteria to judge whether a question is well formed and to sharpen broad requests until they meet them.
What are the four types of analytics?
Descriptive analytics asks what happened, diagnostic asks why it happened, predictive asks what will happen, and prescriptive asks what to do next. The course gives each type its own question patterns and techniques.
How do the exercises work in this course?
Short lessons alternate with exercises in which you classify questions, choose the most relevant one and map techniques to questions, and the final chapter closes with a question classification challenge.
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