University: vision creation

Leadership development texts often refer to the importance of vision – having a vision, constructing a vision and the communication of the vision. But what is vision creation, and how important is it to have…




Manufacturing science

What place is there in the factory for any talk of science? In fact, it all sounds a bit technical, too theoretical, and probably of no use in practice. Theory doesn’t take account of machine…



Excel quartile

Excel quartile

Similar to the PERCENTILE formula, MS Excel has two functions that enable you to find the value in a range of numbers at a specific quartile. QUARTILE.EXC is used if you want to obtain the…


Excel percentile

Excel percentile

MS Excel has two functions that enable you to find the value in a range of numbers at a specific percentile. PERCENTILE.EXC is used if you want to obtain the percentile excluding the first and…


Statistics quantiles

Quantiles are useful for talking about where a particular value lies within a dataset. Unfortunately, they are not that widely understood. We can think of quantile as equal portions of the data distribution. Once we…


Scatter plot with red outlier values

Excel: dealing with outliers

It has been said before, but having clean data is one of the best ways to ensure that your analysis is based on a sound footing. In the same way that we can tell whether a…


Temperature gauge

Machine learning basics

Machine Learning (ML) is very popular at present. It’s capabilities are almost magical if you listen to the software vendors. There is no doubt that ML enables interesting capabilities. If you have ever browsed Amazon…


Ram on scree looking imposing

Human Resource Analytics anyone?

People are the key asset of any business organisation. For a business to be profitable we need to manage resources effectively, especially Human Resources. Human Resource Analytics can help. Years of management practice, organisational research…


Three empty concrete seats

Excel: mean, median, mode

A lot of people will use Microsoft Excel to do their analysis as it is installed on their desktop computer. To do basic descriptive statistics you will need to know how to calculate the mean,…






Data tools: less can be more

The explosion of interest in data analysis has led to a wider audience participating in the development of new methods and tools to help gain new insight. Careers in Data Science are relatively new, but…