Business with Business Analytics MSc (Amsterdam)

This module is the first of two that prepares you to be highly employable by developing key hard and soft skills which have been identified by current research as those necessary for postgraduate students seeking work. The development of the module has been underpinned by Bird and Osland’s (2003) Global Competency Framework (Fig 1.1) and will provide you with two discrete skills sets - emotional and cultural intelligence (soft skills) and business intelligence (hard skills).

Emotional and Cultural Intelligence:
This strand of the module is about the development of self, and is intended to develop your ability to recognise the need for, and to enter into, the process of personal and professional development for both early employability and career progression. This strand is also designed to develop your capacity as an independent learner and to enable the development and application of the transferable (soft) skills, and of individual and group learning, across the programme of study. A key outcome of this process is to provide you with sufficient self-awareness of your intra and interpersonal skills to be able to embark on a creating a personal development plan.

Business Intelligence:
This strand of the module is about the development of practical skills and techniques required by businesses to help them in decision making operations. You will develop skills in problem solving, activity modelling, scorecards and data modelling and will therefore enhance your employability. Building on the programme philosophy of ‘learning by doing’, there will be a strong practical emphasis involving the use of tools such as Soft Systems Methodology (SSM), Balanced Scorecard, Strategy Maps, MS Excel and SAS. In addition to being able to devise quantitative measures and calculations, you will also be able to provide clear, critical, informative management interpretations based on the results obtained.

This is a 40-credit core module running in the first semester of the MSc Business with programme and is developed for those of you who have little or no prior business and management subject experience. The aim of the module is to introduce you to the main business functions – Finance, Marketing, HRM, Operations – and show how each can contribute to the competitive advantage of a firm and hence enable the firm to achieve its strategic objectives. The content of the module comprises six key parts which are listed below.

Business Simulation
Introduction to the module; The Business Simulation – introduction, decision-making, group work and allocation of roles, group presentation – annual report to shareholders; Round-up to the Business Simulation and summative assessment guidance.

Strategy
Developing a Business Plan; The Business Environment; The Competitive Environment; Organisational Objectives; Competitive Strategy; Functional Strategy; Strategic Capabilities; Responsible Decision-making; Evaluating Company Performance.

Financial Management
Cost behaviour and product costing; Cost classification and product costing; Pricing decisions and costing; Behavioural Aspects of Budgeting; Cash Budgeting; Integrated Performance Measures; Balanced Scorecard.

Operations Management
Role of Operations Management; Operations Strategy; Resource planning and capacity management; Quality Management; Global supply networks; JIT and Lean Management; Supplier selection and procurement; Benchmarking and Inventory Management.

Human Resources Management
Understanding HR and its contribution to Business Strategy; Human Resource Planning and Measures; Recruitment, Selection and Retention; Compensation and Benefits; Training and Development; Productivity and Performance Management; Employee Relations; Motivation and Employee Engagement.

Marketing Management
The Role of Marketing; Market Segmentation & Positioning; Buyer Behaviour/Consumer Behaviour; Pricing Strategy; Collecting Information and Forecasting Demand;
New Product Development; Channel Management and International Marketing; Integrated Marketing Communications.

This module is the second of two that prepares you to be highly employable by developing key hard and soft skills, which have been identified by current research as those necessary for postgraduate students seeking work. The development of the module has been underpinned by Bird and Osland’s (2003) Global Competency Framework (Fig 1.1) and will provide you with two discrete skills sets - emotional and cultural intelligence (soft skills) and business intelligence (hard skills).

Business Intelligence:
In this strand of the module you will develop the practical skills and techniques required by businesses to help them in the project management and implementation of business intelligence and business analytics solutions. You will be introduced to some project management processes, tools and methodologies e.g. PMBOK and agile approaches. Such skills will be of great value to you in the workplace and will enhance your employability through developing practice based skills for the contemporary manager, thus emphasising the programme philosophy of ‘learning by doing’. A prominent theme throughout this module, similar to the module in semester 1 is to give you experience in a wide range of industry standard tools and technologies. To that end, most of the teaching plan will involve weekly workshop / seminar classes rather than formal lectures, although there will be some supporting lectures. In addition to being able to provide clear, critical, analysis of data, you will also be able to consider the project implementation skills needs.

Emotional and Cultural Intelligence:
This strand of the module is designed to help you understand key issues and challenges in relation to your employability prospects in the context of your target profession/industry/sector. A particular focus of this strand will be the impact of emotional intelligence, cultural intelligence and self-awareness for your employability as postgraduates. This will include the development of knowledge into the global graduate labour market (including routes such as self-employment and developing your career with an existing employer), drawing upon local, national and international exemplars. A key learning vehicle for this strand of the module is interactive seminars/workshops where you will undertake a number of activities to enable you to build on your self-analysis from Developing Global Management Competencies I and explore further their strengths, weaknesses and areas for further development in the context of your career development plans. You will also receive guidance on how to craft professional, postgraduate CVs, LinkedIn profiles supporting documentation to meet the needs of employers, building on your NX0475 activities and development. Detailed directed reading, diagnostics and interactive exercises will be undertaken which are contextualised to the country of study and/or intended employment, representing the specific needs of our diverse student body.

In this module you will gain an understanding of the academic skills that are required to produce a Masters Dissertation. By the end of the module you will have written a 3000 word dissertation proposal and a 15000 word Masters dissertation. The areas included are:

• Justification for the choice of topic
• Appropriate understanding, awareness and critical analysis of existing and up to date literature evidenced by a comprehensive and well-referenced literature review with an extensive reference list
• Selection, justification and application of an appropriately rigorous methodology - including limitations of the approach selected
• Clear statement of the findings of the research
• Critical analysis of the findings
• Explicit links between the analysis and the conclusions supported by critical argument
• Evidence of original work or thought for example in the form or context of the data collected, analytical process or application of findings

In this module you will learn about a variety of different research methods. This will equip you with the knowledge and practical skills necessary for you to conduct research at Masters’ level and prepare you to complete a Master’s dissertation or consultancy project. By the end of the module you will know how to apply both quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis techniques. In quantitative techniques you will learn about sampling, questionnaire design, statistical inference, and hypothesis testing while qualitative techniques covered will include methods such as interviewing and focus groups. Analysis methods such as content analysis and thematic analysis will also be covered. In addition, you will gain some understanding of research philosophy (positivism and interpretivism) and research ethics and you will be able to write a research proposal to bring these ideas together.

You will undertake the following support sessions across each of the three semesters of your study.

Induction Week

This will involve an introduction to NBS PG Learning – including; Culture, PG learning in a UK University, expectations, programme specific sessions and activities (e.g. a programme task involving group work, information searching and presentation). For UK students, this will also include an ASk task to inform Programme Leaders and the prioritisation of ASk material development.

Semester 1

In the first semester (or first two terms) , the emphasis in terms of skills will be around the development of reflective practice including its practical deployment, experience of writing critically and being able to demonstrate reflective practice and experiential learning within the development of this writing, but equally, explicit development of and practice in everyday academic skills such as presentation preparation and doing, time management. Some lecture sessions will be delivered by the Programme Leader (PL) to their programme. This will give an opportunity to the PL to see their students on a regular basis and will help to build programme identity. The sessions will include: Academic writing, plagiarism, PECS, LA procedures, Assignment / Examination preparation and procedures.

Other sessions will be delivered to all F/T PG students such as managing your time and study skills (e.g. how to identify key factors in managing your time, identifying goals, getting organised, sorting out documents / information and a work schedule etc.), Introduction to Business Information Resources (including online resources) and Plagiarism and the use of Turnitin.

Semester 2 (or terms 3-4)

The module will continue to provide sessions for students to see their Programme Leader on a regular basis so their relationship is maintained. The emphasis of many of the sessions will be on enhancing our postgraduate student’s employability. This will be informed by Northumbria Employability Framework, the Northumbria Employability Plan; ‘Giving Your Career An Edge’ and Northumbria University Employability and Leadership Attributes. In the UK, some sessions will be delivered by the Careers Service. Care will be taken to ensure these sessions will compliment other aspects of employability delivery (in other modules). The careers provision can be customised by CV partners and our London campus to address the specific needs of their students in relation to their place of study. For example, QA in London would like their students to have exposure to their training facilities /courses; an equivalent aid to employability.

Semester 3

The focus will be on ASk tutors supporting the students undertaking their dissertation for example item 12 of the specific skill development sessions.

The following is a list of specific skill development sessions to be delivered over the year:-

1. Understanding of assessment and marking criteria.
2. Reading and taking good notes (this could be delivered by the ASk team or another academic).
3. Speed reading techniques
4. Using the APA system of referencing
5. Understanding and avoiding Plagiarism
6. Describing arguments and making proposals
7. Academic reading skills (the ASk team) reading techniques, scanning, skimming, deep reading, critical reading and strategies for effective reading.
8. Writing skills (ASk team) – writing assignment, analysing the task, planning, identifying information sources, identifying key ideas, writing drafts, reviewing and editing work, presenting, submission and using feedback.
9. Time Management
10. Presentation skills – preparing, researching, planning, organisation and rehearsing.
11. Working in groups – what is an effective working group, meetings, organisation, making notes and managing the group.
12. Understanding and writing the Chapters of a Dissertation
Describing arguments and making proposals
Evaluating Research Objectives
Describing bias and limitations of research
Writing reflective statements

This option is offered as an alternative to the NBS Masters’ Dissertation on all 1-year MSc programmes and in the second semester of year 2 on the 2-year programme variants with Study Abroad and with Advanced Practice (if the students select an Internship in semester 1), again as a Dissertation alternative. It is also offered as alternative to the Management Investigation on the MBA.

On this consultancy based module you will enhance your individual effectiveness and employability skills by locating the learning and development in an organisational context. In doing so, you will promote personal and group development, commercial awareness, and a range of inter-personal, intellectual and practical skills and knowledge centred on and demonstrated through a group negotiated real-time work-based project.

The content of the management report will be unique. The nature and scope of the area of your investigation will be defined and agreed in collaboration with the organisation and the University supervisor. The syllabus will include:

• Conducting research in organisations.
• Identifying researchable questions.
• Consultancy and project management skills.
• Research methods and doing a literature review
• Presentation, communication and report writing skills.
• Analysing findings.
• Writing recommendations and action plans.
• Reflecting on work based experiential learning.

In undertaking this project based module, you will critically reflect and evaluate upon organisational practices and their relation with academic theory, and in doing so, provide practical and actionable recommendations through an investigative management report.

The assessment for your module consists of a Group Consultancy Report (7,000 words) and Final Client Presentation, weighted at 60%, alongside an Individual Assignment comprising a Literature Review (4000 words) and a Reflective Learning Statement (2,000 words), weighted at 40%.

In this module, you will explore the important role of the website in an organisation’s digital marketing strategy.

You will learn the principles of website evaluation and will use analytic tools for the analysis of web data to help measure the effectiveness of web marketing and improve the user experience.

The module will aim to give you:

An Introduction to Web Marketing
Website Evaluation – comprising Context of Use & Usability, Layout & Navigation, Home Page & Testing.
Application of web marketing including search engine optimisation, pay per click, conversion rate optimisation
An introduction to Web Analytics, with particular reference to an industrial standard application (most likely Google analytics). This will cover determining how the software application works, data collection, analysis and reporting.
Campaign Metrics and Measurement.
Multichannel Metrics.
Consolidation and/or assessment.
At the end of the module you may be in a position to take the Google Analytics Individual Qualification (GAIQ) test as part of your broader Continual Professional Development.

In this module, you will explore the important role of the business intelligence to support an organisation’s effective decision making.

You will be introduced to data management strategies and the use of business analytic tools for the analysis of organisational data.

The aim of this module it to equip you to:

Develop appropriate organisational strategy for data-management, including its storage, accessibility and readiness for decision making.

Identify the applications for, and critically apply, business intelligence across a range of organisational contexts.

Employ various analytics tools to organisational data analysis and decision making.

Develop and critically evaluate data-management processes.

Develop critical decision making and communication skills.

To be in a position to take a SAS certification as part of your broader Continual Professional Development.