Course content

Through five core and five elective modules, you will cover the skills, methods, and tools needed to address complex organisational situations and enable better decision-making. You will also gain consultancy experience through your project & dissertation, working with an external client organisation. The programme starts in September 2012, and extends beyond the normal undergraduate term dates.

The core modules are taught together with our MSc in Management Science & Operational Research to provide you with the fundamental skill set required by an analytic consultant. The elective modules for our MSc BAC then build on this foundation, allowing you to further examine areas of advanced analytics, strategic modelling, and analysis.

Core modules

Analytic Consulting: Learn the skills essential for successful consultancy. Explore how to structure problem situations, and formulate, test, and validate models to produce recommendations. Practise a range of modelling approaches exploring the circumstances in which they might most appropriately be applied. Learn to conduct literature reviews, undertake interviews, and make individual and group presentations.
Business Statistics: Gain a foundation in the analysis and presentation of quantitative data. Examine the basic elements of probability and statistics, essential to management science and OR, and undertake computer-based analysis using a statistics package.
Foundations of Management: Taught by experts from across WBS, this is an intensive introduction to the major components of management: operations management, accounting, and marketing. Consider the theory and practice of these disciplines to understand the context within which management decisions are made.
Management Science & Operational Research Techniques: Develop your knowledge and understanding of a wide range of OR techniques, with an emphasis on the role of modelling processes in decision-making. Gain practical experience in using optimisation, simulation, and decision analysis to model practical management problems and evaluate a range of options.
Spreadsheet Modelling: Get hands-on computing experience with business computing tools, exploring simulation, stochastic processes, and general data management. Expand your conceptual and practical understanding of spreadsheets by building and specifying applications that meet the brief, and are both usable and well-documented.

Elective modules

In previous years we have offered the following electives:

Decision Analysis Consulting: Explore the methodologies and techniques of Decision Analysis, a well established and widely applied modelling approach to evaluating strategic decisions. Use mapping approaches to explore managers' mental models about decision situations.
Organisational Performance Analysis: Appreciate the need to measure the efficiency of resource utilisation in organisations, as competition in the private sector becomes ever more intense and budgets are cut in the public sector. Examine methods for the comparative evaluation of business units.
Supporting Strategy: Frameworks & Methods: Study a set of essential elements of the strategic planning process, and explore how models and analytical techniques can support that process. Focus on strategy formulation, systems modelling, uncertainty assessment, and generation and selection of strategic options.
Advanced Data Analysis: Explore a range of sophisticated statistical methods to convert information into knowledge. Gain practical experience in the use of specialised software to analyse large sets of data information, and be able to report on the analysis in a practical way for improved management decision-making.
Financial Analysis for Management: Details tbc
Simulation Methods: Study one of the most commonly used operational research methods. Learn the theory behind simulation modelling, and appreciate the range of applications for which it is useful. Gain practical experience in using commercial simulation software.
Strategy Analysis: Details tbc

Dissertation

Choose whether to undertake your project & 15,000 word dissertation as a consultant to an organisation or as applied research.

Consultancy projects

Working as a consultant for a real client demonstrates to employers that you can apply your knowledge. Test your ability to assess a problem and adopt the best approach to tackling it. Exercise your client liaison and management skills. You will usually write a client report in addition to your dissertation.

Recent projects include:

Review & development of pricing models for a leading bank
Market strategy for a manufacturing group
Developing a bespoke analytical tool for a leading internet provider
Identifying benchmarking guidelines for the service operations industry
Preparing Local Authorities for UK energy security for a UK Local Authority
A Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis approach to value for money benchmarking for an IT support training company.

Research dissertation

A research project allows you to explore a topic critical to effective decision-making in organisations. Supervised by one of our academics, demonstrate that you can undertake systematic and rigorous applied research.

Recent projects include:

The impact of analytic consulting interventions
Rational consumer behaviour & decision-making
The impact of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme on reducing CO₂ emissions
The need for cognitive closure and group decision aids
An analysis into the effects of advertising and word of mouth
Designing a participative approach to enable implementation of study findings.