Business Analytics, Step by Step for 2027

Learn to turn business questions into sound analysis and clear decisions, from preparing data and choosing charts to forecasting, testing what works and acting on the results.

Who it's for

Managers, team leaders, analysts and founders who want to use data to make better decisions. You do not need a statistics background: the arithmetic is worked through with small examples, and every method runs in a spreadsheet or the reporting tool you already have.

What you'll learn

• Turn a vague request for “the data” into an analysis plan, using Gartner’s four types of analysis: descriptive, diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive
• Prepare data with a written cleaning log and shape it into tidy tables, in Hadley Wickham’s sense of the term
• Match each chart to its question and design dashboards around decisions, following Edward Tufte’s data-ink idea and Ben Shneiderman’s “overview first” principle
• Diagnose why a number moved with a driver tree, drill-downs, cohort analysis and Pareto analysis
• Tell correlation from causation and design a fair A/B test with a control group, an adequate sample and a fixed duration
• Build honest forecasts with moving averages, exponential smoothing and trend lines, measure their error with MAPE and present a range
• Use what-if tables and a spreadsheet solver to choose the best option, and analyse personal data lawfully under UK GDPR

What's inside

• 85 pages, 12 chapters
• Each chapter gives you key concepts, a step-by-step method, an illustrative example from a fictional UK organisation, a ready-to-use tool, common mistakes, a recap of the key steps and a short exercise to try this week
• Worked examples from fictional UK organisations, including a food distributor, an online shop and a community charity
• A tool in every chapter, including the analysis brief, data cleaning log, chart chooser, dashboard specification sheet, experiment design card and analytics ethics checklist
• A 30-60-90 day action plan with checklists, plus a glossary
• PDF in A4 format — read on screen or print
• Instant download after purchase

Contents

1. From Business Question to Analysis Plan
2. Finding and Preparing Your Data
3. Describing What Happened
4. Choosing the Right Chart
5. Designing Dashboards People Use
6. Diagnosing Why It Happened
7. Cause or Coincidence? Testing What Works
8. Forecasting What Comes Next
9. Prescriptive Analytics: Choosing the Best Option
10. Turning Insight into Action
11. Analysing Data Ethically and Lawfully
12. Building an Analytics Capability

Part of The Business Library

This title is one of the 55 ebooks in The Business Library, available together for £109 (worth £1,437 if bought separately: the total of the individual prices of the included titles in our store). It is also included in The Ultimate Business Bundle, which adds 8 checklists and toolkits and 10 workbooks — all 73 products for £147.