SCENARIO (DATA COMPLETED AND ATTACHED)

You recently met with your manager so that he could give you a new assignment. It turns out that your company’s competitors have been closing in on market share. Your manager explains that leadership needs to take a closer look at the composition of the workforce. He wants you to use your quantitative reasoning skills to analyze some important data. He tells you your analysis will contribute to strategic decisions as the leadership considers how best to position the company for expansion, growth, and a more agile response to fluctuating markets. He’ll present this data to the company leaders at their quarterly strategic planning meeting. You know that you will need to use your statistical skills and technical skills to identify and manipulate the data. You’ll also need to draw relevant conclusions based on quantitative reasoning.

QUESTIONS TO BE ADDRESSED IN ESSAY (DATA COMPLETED AND ATTACHED)

Now that you have completed your analysis, think about the patterns you’ve seen in the workforce and how you can connect the formulas you’ve used with what you produced. Answer these questions with short answers.

1. From the created histogram, it appears that a large share of employees have a salary between $31,000—$40,000 or $51,000—$60,000. This may indicate reasonable promotion rate for new employees. Is this distribution unimodal or bimodal? Explain.

2. The line chart, as detailed in your “Graph Charts” Excel spreadsheet, shows sales increasing over the years, after an initial few rocky years from 1999 to 2002. Assuming that the sales are linear, use the Forecast tool to find projected sales for 2019 and 2020. Hint: An easy way to do this is to highlight the sales from the data page and apply the Forecast tool to this data. Your output will be a chart and a new sheet with projected sales for average, upper, and lower range growth.

3. The standard deviation provides insight into the distribution of values around the mean. If the standard deviation is small, the more narrow the range will be between the lowest and highest value. That is, values will cluster close to the mean. From your descriptive statistics, describe your standard deviations. What does this tell you about the variables?

4. The company has a keen interest in the educational, race, and gender makeup of its workforce. Its emphasis is on a diverse, dynamic workforce. From your “Graph Charts” spreadsheet, describe your pie chart findings for these characteristics of the workforce. Describe how you would determine if the company was meeting expectations on these characteristics.

5. The company is conducting an analysis on how many positions to create to keep up with demand. Specifically, it wants to know an estimate of the number of positions per job title. From your Excel chart, identify the mode of the job title distribution. Describe your findings.

FINAL ESSAY (DATA COMPLETED AND ATTACHED)

Now that you have done all the work with data, write a short three- to four-paragraph summary of your analysis. This is important. While you have done a wonderful job with your analysis, you can never assume that the end user will be able to interpret the data the way it should be understood. Supporting narrative is helpful. Never simply provide a “raw data” dump. Instead, seek to provide information!

a. Write a one-paragraph narrative summary of your findings, describing patterns of interest.

b. Provide an explanation of the potential relevance of such patterns.

c. Provide a description of how you would investigate further to determine if your results are “good or bad” for the company.