About the course

As an engineer in a leadership position, you will be faced with new responsibilities and tasks. These may include developing a business (unit) strategy and a business plan and being involved in strategic planning. Your success in dealing with these new responsibilities will largely depend on your ability to have a helicopter view of a situation and to make sound decisions. In order to make decisions to move your organization forward, leaders will need to ensure that business goals are achievable and well-balanced while also taking into account the uncertainty of future developments. In a complex business environment, a sound strategy is the result of applying a strategic mindset and systematic approach to decision making.

This course will help you in building and applying an analytical toolkit, including:

  • scenario analysis
  • stakeholder analysis
  • goal analysis
  • multi-criteria decision analysis

The focus of the course will be on utilizing your analytical skills in a business context, allowing you to unravel complex decision situations to formulate a sound business strategy.

LICENSE

The course materials of this course are Copyright Delft University of Technology and are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC-BY-NC-SA) 4.0 International License.

What you will learn

By the end of this course you will know:

  • How to use a systematic approach to deal with complex decision situations;
  • How to apply a set of practical analytical techniques to support business planning and strategic decision making;
  • How to develop an analytical mindset that helps your organization move in the desired direction.

About the instructors

Alexander de Haan graduated as an aerospace engineer as well as an organizational psychologist. He holds a PhD on the analysis of sustainable aircraft technology.

He works from his own company as consultant, coach, trainer and business analyst. From there, he teaches at universities, business schools and in company programs worldwide, both on-site and on-line. Among others, Alexander designs, teaches and supervises programs on systematic analytical skills to get a firm grip on complex situations to thousands of students each year on all levels.

Prof dr Hans de Bruijn is Professor of Public Administration in the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management at Delft University of Technology. His research focuses on governance issues at the intersection of politics, management and technology, such as decision-making about large-scale infrastructure projects, the privatisation and deregulation of utilities, safety and security, river management, regulation and inspection, managing professionals and various types of government policy relating to technology.

Els van Daalen has an MSc in mechanical engineering and holds a PhD from Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands on the topic of validation of knowledge based systems. She is associate professor of policy analysis at Delft University, and has been involved in teaching and research on methods for systems and policy analysis for over 20 years. Her area of interest is model-based support for decision-making. She is responsible for the on-campus course on problem analysis. Els has developed courses on system dynamics modelling and has been involved in developing the faculty’s educational programs. She has taught and supervised university students at all levels.

Duration: 5 weeks, 4-5 hours per week

Language: English

Instructors: Alexander de Haan, Hans de Bruijn and Els van Daalen

Institution: Delft University of Technology

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