Business Analysis: From Problems to Data-Informed Decisions

Sales are down — build us a dashboard." "Onboarding is broken, we need a new system." Most business problems arrive already wearing a solution, and the person handed them is expected to make it work. This course is about the move almost nobody is taught: taking the solution back off, finding the real problem underneath, and only then deciding what to actually do. It walks the whole arc a business analyst owns. You'll clarify a vague ask into a real problem — separating the request from the need, tracing a symptom to its root cause with the 5 Whys and a fishbone, and stating a problem as a measurable gap rather than a wish. You'll gather requirements that hold up: the four types, user stories and INVEST, use cases, acceptance criteria, the non-functional needs that quietly sink projects, and the traceability that keeps every requirement tied to a need. You'll map how work really flows — swimlanes, BPMN, value stream maps — and find the delay hiding in a handoff no single team can see. You'll analyze evidence without fooling yourself: why an average lies, why correlation isn't cause, what an A/B test actually proves, and how to read a confident dashboard skeptically. Then you'll recommend — honest options against a do-nothing baseline, a business case, a decision matrix, measurable success criteria, and the discipline to check afterward whether it worked. Two ideas run through all of it: a recommendation is only as good as the problem and evidence beneath it, and a good analyst informs the decision but doesn't own it. No coding, no statistics background. Just the judgment to turn "do something" into something worth doing.