Applied Data Analytics Project Course

The Applied Data Analytics Project course offers students a chance to complete a data analytics project for a real client using real data - to develop impactful solutions to the client’s business challenge.  MBA students from Haas will work on teams with data science focused graduate students from UC Berkeley’s School of Information, with support from Accenture’s big data group. Together you will take on a data-driven project, focused on solving a challenging issue for one of Accenture’s clients. Your team will take the challenge from data assessment and problem definition through to final client recommendations.  The outcome of your project should be a set of strategic and tactical recommendations to increase the client’s effectiveness. 

Successful analytics projects require managerial discipline, iterative problem solving skills, a solid grounding in the client’s business (whether an internal or external client) effective communications with both team and client, and data analytics tools and techniques  — including data set analysis, modeling, interpretation, and presentation.  The primary objective of this course — and of the projects — is to gain valuable experience in applying the approaches, skills, and tools needed to have an impact on business results through the use of data analytics.

This course is cross-listed as MBA247.1B.

Notes:

• The course runs 8 weeks, starting October 19.
• The focus is on the project based application of data to drive a client’s business decision making. We will not be teaching the technical foundations or practical software for data analytics:  Students are expected to contribute prior knowledge either in hard data analytics skills or strategic analysis of business problems using data-driven frameworks.   As a result, we require that students have completed the basic data course (Data Science and Data Strategy). Equivalent work experience or prior background may also be accepted.  Please contact the Haas@Work program office for further details
• For each project, there will be 2-3 formal client workshops/presentations outside of normal Monday evening class hours, in addition to the normal outside work and coordination needed to manage your client, the deliverables, and your team responsibilities.
• Once assigned a project, you may be required to sign an NDA and IP waiver
• As is the case with many of the Experiential learning courses,  we need to make early client commitments and share information in advance of the  course. Therefore, please note that there is no add/drop period for this course.