Unit description

Master of Business Administration

Accounting for Managers 

While this unit provides an introduction to accounting issues relevant to both preparers and users of business reports, it predominantly explores the principles of financial and management accounting from a user perspective. The focus of the unit is on decision-making, providing practical knowledge of preparing basic financial statements and analysing information obtained from the accounting system to assist in management decision-making. 

 

Business Finance 

This unit provides students with an understanding of the macroeconomic setting in which corporate financial decisions are made. They will be exposed to finance theory, and the tools and techniques used in financial decision-making. To assist students in achieving this understanding, it is necessary for them to perform basic financial calculations. The conceptual framework and techniques covered in this unit will provide students who wish to progress to a practitioner role within the finance discipline with a foundation for further studies. 

International Business Negotiations 

This unit analyses the nature of negotiation, examines negotiating strategies, tactics and processes, and considers the impacts of emotion on the negotiating process. It aims to equip managers with the tools necessary to enable them to effectively participate and engage in cross-cultural negotiations. 

Leading the Engaged Enterprise 

The modern enterprise engages with all quarters of society as it pursues its goals. The core of the engaged enterprise is its people, who execute strategy with intent while continually exploring new horizons. This unit focuses on fostering and engaging with staff by distributing leadership at all levels of the enterprise, leveraging the power of groups and reaffirming the strategic role of human capital development in learning to innovate new responses to organisational challenges. 

Organisational Behaviour and Management 

Introducing students to concepts and theories of organisational behaviour is useful to managers, this unit also considers behavioural impacts at individual, group and organisational levels. The focus is on helping students understand themselves and how they could operate, today and in the future, within the management contexts of a globalised world. The unit uses experiential, practical and problem-solving activities to explore organisational behaviour and challenges for managers, individuals and interactions in organisations, organisational dynamics, and organisational processes and characteristics. 

Strategies for Growth and Excellence 

This unit enables students to investigate how firms and organisations design and execute effective strategies, and it explores relevant issues such as environmental, leadership and organisational culture and values, macro-globalisation, market competition, meso-government regulatory frameworks and shareholder/stakeholder needs, micro-resources, sustainability and information communications technology. Students will analyse recent case studies and “hot topics” in strategy drawn from the media and business journals. 

Master of Information Technology (Artificial Intelligence and Data Science)

Artificial Intelligence 

This unit gives an overview of the application and associated theories of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and the techniques used in developing intelligent systems. The emphasis is on business, data science and engineering problems. Upon completion, students should be able to evaluate machine learning techniques and manage the application of various tools available for developing such systems to solve problems in the real world. Topics include artificial neural networks (including deep learning), data mining, fuzzy systems, genetic algorithms, intelligent agents, optimisation techniques and rule-based systems. 

Business Analytics 

Business analytics is a broad term that encompasses a number of approaches, skills and technologies to the analysis of business data for the purpose of supporting management decision-making. This unit will explore business analytics using a number of case studies, real-life datasets and publicly available analytics tools. Students will apply the theories addressed in the unit to case studies in order to develop the technical skills required to gain a deeper understanding of business analytics. 

Data Analytics 

This unit examines topics relevant to data science. It includes data cleaning, summarising data using descriptive statistics and graphical displays, using linear models for both inference and prediction, and applying methods for dimension reduction and classification. Throughout the unit, advanced statistical software will play an important role in data visualisation and analysis, and topics will be motivated through the presentation of a range of real research problems. A project will be used to simulate statistical problems commonly encountered by data scientists in the workplace. 

Data Resources Management 

This unit sees the information available in corporate databases as a significant strategic resource. It focuses on the issues involved in managing and strategically using data, including the discovery of trends and patterns, and new knowledge creation. Topics include the nature of the data resource and the intelligent enterprise, data distribution and architectures, data administration, planning, design and exploitation of the data resource, knowledge management, and issues of data ownership and security. 

Foundations of Data Science 

The objectives of this unit are to introduce students to an understanding of data, uncover patterns within it and develop models whose prediction accuracy on future, unknown data can be quantified. 

Major topics include assessment of model performance, classification models, concepts of statistical learning, extracting meaning from data, machine learning algorithms, over-fitting and model tuning, recommendation engines and social networks, and regression models. The R programming language and software environment will be introduced to students and used to demonstrate implementations. 

Information Technology Project Management 

This unit covers the principles and practices of managing the development of information technology systems. Upon completion, students should be able to use appropriate tools and techniques based on the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBoK).