Sound business decisions depend on more than data alone. Managers must recognize meaningful patterns, understand uncertainty, and judge when the available evidence is strong enough to support action.
In this two-course specialization from Harvard Business School Online, you’ll build foundational business analytics skills from two complementary perspectives. Finding Insights in Data focuses on visualizations, descriptive statistics, relationships among variables, time series, and how analytics and machine learning inform business decisions. Making Decisions with Limited Data explores sampling, bias, variation, hypothesis testing, confidence intervals, and decision thresholds.
Through applied business scenarios, you’ll practice interpreting evidence without overstating its implications, evaluating statistical results, and weighing the costs of false positives and false negatives. Together, these courses help you move from describing patterns in data to judging how confidently it should guide action.
Applied Learning Project
Across the specialization, you’ll apply analytics concepts to real-life managerial scenarios through practice assignments, discussions, and cumulative assessments.
In Finding Insights in Data, you’ll interpret histograms and outliers; select measures of central tendency; analyze percentiles, scatter plots, correlation, and time series; and evaluate when analytics and AI can support managerial judgment.
In Making Decisions with Limited Data, you’ll assess sample representativeness and survey bias; interpret variation and sample stability; frame hypotheses; evaluate p-values and confidence intervals; and defend evidence thresholds in business and clinical AI scenarios. Each course concludes with a synthesis reading and a 12-question cumulative graded assessment.
