Introduction

Performance is all what executives are caring about. Whether on organizational, departmental, or even team level and individual level, performance must be identified, measured and consequently presented to judge whether target has been achieved. At its root, performance is a qualitative term and very challenging to capture, nevertheless, it must be measured. The only way to do so is to quantify it by suggesting specific, yet measurable indicators. If wrongly defined and chosen, the true performance will always be impossible to attain. All processes, functions, and even tasks have to have indicators that show their performance for decision making.

Although presenting the performance indicators through dashboard is very essential to any business, nevertheless analyzing them in order to discover their true meaning is quite challenging practice for any executives. Moreover, performance indicators selection is considered one of the critical steps within the decision making process. Based on industry or sectoral norms, most organizations have reached and likely defined set of key performance indicators for setting their targets and goals. Nevertheless, taking the performance indicators at their face value could mislead the decision makers in setting the organizational target as well as in judging the true performance of their business.

Objective and Scope

The objective of this course is to introduce to the participants a process for analyzing the performance indicators with the purpose to capture the hidden messages and meaning within them. The course moreover, will show the participants how to produce statistical indicators that could better represent the true performance of the business.

The course also aims at creating and developing quantitative thinking culture within the organization for better and efficient communication among staff members.  

Key Issues to be covered

·         The Process: Rethinking the KPIs (Business and Technical Perspective)

o   The Philosophy behind Estimation of the Truth

·         The Answers are there! but what are the Questions?

o   Do we have the Right Data and Information to answer the Questions?

o   Building the Framework that integrates the Business Target with the Resources. 

·         Essentials of Data Analysis/Analytics

o   Descriptive Data Analysis

§  Numerical and Graphical

§  Central Tendency of the Data

§  Variations in the Data

§  Outliers Detection: Univariate (One Dimensional)

o   Distributions of the Data

§  Why Distributions are the Keys for Decision Making and Performance Management (Tracking and Monitoring)

o   Inferential Data Analysis

§  Basics of Probability Theory (Why we need it?)

§  Probability Distributions are the Engines for Decision Making

o   It is all about Assessing the Impact (Effect)

§  Types of Impact (Effect)

§  Tools to Assess the Impacts (Effects)

§  The Link between the Reality and the Analytics World

§  T-value, F-ratio, Chi-Squared Statistics and more

§  What are the Business Stories behind them?

·         Generalizing the Results (Predictive View) and Decision Taking

o   The Beautify of p-value

o   The Threshold of Decision Taking (alpha)

·         Fundamentals of Correlation Analysis

·         Multiple Linear Regression to prioritize the Business Actions

·         Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) as a Way to Assess the Effect

·         The Statistical KPIs as the Core and Backbone of the Business Dashboard

Learning Objective and Skills to be Acquired

Participants of the course will learn:

o   How to identify and validate the Business Problem and Issues

o   How to revise and select the Business Performance Indicators

o   How to build an appropriate Framework for the Business

o   How to measure and collect the required Data

o   How to analyze Quantitatively the Performance Indicators

o   How to Design and Develop a simple Statistical Dashboard

Moreover, this course will help participants acquire or/and develop several skills such as, quantitative decision making, problem solving, and critical thinking.

Who should attend

Since this course is not only aiming at providing the data analysis knowledge to the staff, but also at changing the mindset of staff to develop their attitude and their skills towards the decision making process. Then, this course is meant for wide range of staff with various backgrounds who are working in different functions, whether in finance, operations, human resources, sales, marketing, and customer service.

Duration and Delivery

This program is 3 full days program with total of 24 Instruction hours. Within the course a lot of hands on activities will be followed and performed, such as brainstorming, group discussion, think-pair-share, group work.

Important Note: Participants need to bring their laptop with Microsoft Excel installed during the sessions. Add-ins Analysis ToolPak should be installed and ready from within the Excel program.