Data Driven Decisions: Reversed Workbook

This book is intended for the students and teachers of evidence based decision making, especially when the evidences are obtained from numerical facts. It specifically covers business modeling, decision analytics, and forecasting. All planning and decision making start with some estimation of what the future holds for a business and thus, we need to forecast the future. Generally, there can be more than one forecast for most real situations based on the model one uses to forecast them. Business modeling can help us with calculating what those multiple forecasts of the future mean for the things that the business is interested in, such as profit, costs, pay off, returns etc. These are also called outcomes. Once we get the forecasts depicting the future, we can devise and assess multiple actions, and choose one of them that get the best outcome for the business. Decision analytics help us with this assessment. This book is best used for problem based learning and instruction. Problem based learning introduces the problem first for the students to work on, along with the instructor. Students learn by doing. They can practice multiple problems for practice until the underlying principles and lessons are understood and absorbed. Then the formal theories and principles are presented to make sense of what the students have already done and learned. This can also be called reversed learning because it reverses the process of the traditional learning method of theory first and problem solving later. The first of the book provides the problem and the second half of the book provides brief theories and principles, and solutions of the problems.