Variance and standard deviation are concepts that can be quite confusing. Variance tends to be more confusing than standard deviation. The reason for this is because variance can mean many different things depending on the field of interest. Remember if you say that variance is the difference between an observed and expected value or the difference between actual versus budgeted, then you would be wrong. This is variance in business, but not statistics. Variance is a measure of dispersion around the mean.

With that said, how may variance and standard deviation be applied to a real-world business-related problem? Provide a specific application in which these measures are useful.