Practice / Business analysis
01 / LEARNING BY DOING
Turn an ambiguous brief into requirements and a testable plan.
02 / LEARNING BY DOING
Use real SQL and downloadable Excel cases to validate a decision.
03 / LEARNING BY DOING
Practice senior tradeoffs, governance and measurable outcomes.
Follow Northstar Retail from slow refunds to a proposed future process. Build six connected artifacts, compare worked examples and keep your own drafts.
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Data skills
EXCEL · HANDS-ON WORKBOOK
Totals: 48 cases, 24 SLA breaches (>4 days), £170.40 handling cost. Pivot source is Prepared; filter headers and refresh after edits.
EXCEL · HANDS-ON WORKBOOK
Invoices total £10,200; allocated payments £9,200; outstanding net £1,000. One orphan payment INV-999 (£125) is excluded from allocation; investigate it. INV-108 is overpaid £100.
EXCEL · HANDS-ON WORKBOOK
60% adoption: £12,192 annual net, 4.92-year payback, −39.04% 3-year ROI. 90%: £24,288, 2.47 years, 21.44%. License costs recur annually; implementation occurs once.
Fictional datasets. Work in a spreadsheet app; answer files include editable formulas and pivot-ready data. Formulas recalculate when opened in Excel or LibreOffice.
Senior practice · 35 minutes each
Create a one-page decision brief with stakeholder interests, non-negotiables, three options, evidence needed, recommendation and escalation route. Rebaseline scope and acceptance criteria after a decision.
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Calculate gross and net annual value, simple payback and 3-year undiscounted ROI at both adoption levels. Separate cash savings from released capacity and propose a validation plan.
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Design a RACI for exception queues, access, process changes and metric definitions. Propose escalation thresholds, service targets and a governance meeting that can make decisions.
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Build a dependency map and critical decision dates. Define data profiling, mapping, deduplication, trial migration, reconciliation, cutover, rollback and ownership. State go/no-go criteria.
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Define pass/fail controls before weighted scoring. Create criteria, weights totaling 100%, a proof-of-concept script, TCO assumptions and exit requirements. Explain sensitivity to weights.
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Prepare a benefits review with segmentation, leading and lagging indicators, causal hypotheses, corrective experiments, guardrails, owners and review dates.
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Returning to work
Use these as structures, then adapt them to your actual history. Practice projects demonstrate preparation; real work stories demonstrate experience.
“I took a career break for [brief explanation you are comfortable sharing]. I am now ready to return. To refresh my analysis skills, I completed a fictional returns-process case study, documented requirements and UAT, and practised SQL and Excel. My earlier experience in [actual role] gives me relevant examples of [real transferable skill].” Replace brackets with truthful details; disclose only what you choose.
“My most recent practice project was a simulated retail returns transformation. I mapped the current handoffs, identified assumptions, wrote measurable requirements and linked them to UAT cases. I did not deploy this in a company. A useful lesson was that faster median refunds can hide worse exceptions, so I added tail latency and incorrect-refund guardrails.” Then connect to a genuine work example if you have one.
“I have not yet held a BA title. In [actual context], I clarified needs with [real people] and organized [real task or evidence]. I am building formal requirements, process-mapping and data skills through practice.” Explain your own contribution and a real outcome; never present model artifacts or invented savings as employment experience.