Capstone project

Project Objective:

The objective of this capstone project is to provide you with an opportunity to employ in practice the statistical tools and concepts you have learned in this statistics course and to further help in cementing these ideas into part of your skill set as a successful business manager.

Like all real world applications, it is not expected that through the completion of this project you will have utilized every statistical technique that you have learned in this class.  Rather, an objective of the assignment will be for you to determine which of the statistical tools and techniques are appropriate to employ for the situation you have selected. However, in this particular case you will be utilizing things like descriptive statistics, computing a confidence interval (at confidence level of your choosing) and then conducting an appropriate hypothesis test (at alpha level of your choice).

Project Description

 You are the chief analyst for a medium-sized company.  An executive hands you a data set and asks you how this data set can be used to improve the business.  The executive knows it can help somehow but wants someone to think through it first.

It might make sense to dream up an imaginary for-profit or non-profit business and a business plan or process that could be impacted by the dataset you have selected.

You will write up a short report of your findings.  Your team will also make a short presentation of your sources, methods and findings in front of the class.

Teams

You can work in teams of up to four individuals and collect data and submit this report. Be creative.

Guidelines for Selecting a Project

The following points will constitute critical success factors for your project. Please pay close attention to these points as they will be used as guidelines for grading your project. The final report should be presented in a professional format using the style and format prescribed below.

• Use good data A data set that comes from a trustworthy source, has a variety of data types (ordinal, interval, ratio) and a unique and interesting subject matter. It must also be publicly available or licensed for academic use.
• Make it easy to understand Try to distill the main findings down to a short, punchy statement that you can lead the class to be interested in your work.
• Apply your learnings from the class Specifically use formulas and vocabulary from the class to describe your work
• Conduct a hypothesis test Although you may not know right now what that means, pay special attention to chapters 8 & 9 when we get close.
• Be professional This is a chance to produce interesting work that a future employer might be interested in.

Tools and Resources:

• Use Excel to conduct your analysis for computing descriptive statistics, confidence intervals, hypothesis testing, p-values etc., but make sure to describe it in English as to what is going on and what the output means.
• You may use any data visualization tools besides excel to display charts
• Applying what you learned from each chapter is a good way to understand the data and discover something interesting for a business case. You will be given some time in class to do this.

Report Writing

Your report needs to leave a professional business impression in both writing quality and its physical appearance. Do not try to make it unnecessary long by leaving lots of white space or large font size. At the same time you must not leave out vital information from it. Most of all it should be:

• Free of spelling and grammar errors.
• Single space with a 12-point font size
• You should have a cover page with your name(s) and relevant class information and the title of your project.
• You should have a page of Executive Summary in which you briefly describe what you were trying to accomplish, what you did, how you did it, what you found and what your recommendations and conclusions are. This page is at the front of the report but is usually written last.
• You should have an analysis section with Excel output and description in English what you are doing, which equations you used and why and most importantly what do the answers imply.
• You should have a conclusion page describing what your results mean and if any inferences should be drawn from them.

Other related tidbits

• You can have teams of up to four students.
• The credit will be applied to your overall points earned in the class. All members of the team get same amount of credit. Unless it becomes obvious that a certain member did not contribute.
• Please check the due date in your class calendar above.
• Feel free to ask any questions.
• The Cornell Science Rubric is a good guideline to follow to produce a high-quality report that will receive a good grade.