Overview:

This assignment requires you to work independently and draw upon the research proposal developed in PPMP20015. Your work will be overseen by a supervisor who is an academic member of staff. You will work with the supervisor for the entire duration of the research project over the two terms. The onus is on you to make contact with the supervisor and to arrange and adhere to a programme of regular meetings thereafter. The supervisor is not obliged to chase you in order to check on your work progress. The supervisor should advise on the structure and suitability of the work, guide you through the entire process and warn you if the work is not thought to be of a satisfactory standard. You should maintain contact with your supervisor throughout the preparation of your work. A common pitfall is to go long periods of time without making any contact with the supervisor. You must attend the six compulsory meetings with your supervisor as scheduled in the unit profile. You must also apply project management competencies in completing this phase of your research project.

The task

Your task is to conduct a focused study on previous scholarly work that was carried out on the area of your research question and present the work via a progress report. The task requires you to demonstrate that you can conduct a piece of rigorous literature review in your chosen field and involves critical appraisal and review of key arguments. The task then requires you to update your research questions or hypothesis and refine and finalise your research methodology. During this journey, you are required to apply project management competencies throughout this phase. You are expected to demonstrate a high level of project management and leadership competencies in this unit by meeting the given milestones, effectively tracking & updating your work progress, adopting quality assurance and control and mitigating risks or delays. Your supervisor will keep a regular diary of your activities for comparison with your progress report for validation and assessment purposes. This assignment consists of three main deliverables or parts as per the following table:

Assessment item Weight:

Part A: Annotated Bibliography (20%) due by Week 5

Part B: Critical Literature Review (30%) due by week 8

Part C: Detailed Research Design (40%) due by week 12

Part D: Project Management Documentation (10%) due by week 13

Part A: Annotated Bibliography

In this part, you will develop an annotated bibliography. This part comprises of a list of reference materials that includes a summary of the main ideas presented in each reference and evaluates how useful the reference is for your purposes. Each entry is comprised of useful bibliographical information presented in a standard referencing style (e.g. CQU Harvard) followed by a detailed note or annotation. The annotation usually provides a summary of key points and an evaluation or critique of the ideas discussed in the reference. In addition, you should state how it relates to your proposed research topic.

Annotated bibliographies can vary in style depending on the purpose and the referencing style used. They are usually arranged in alphabetical order by author.

You are required to prepare an annotated bibliography of 15 high-quality journal articles, refereed conference papers and/or scholarly books closely related to your proposed research topic. Further guidelines will be available in Moodle to help you complete this part.

Part B: Critical Literature Review

In this part, you will critically review the literature relating to your topic. You are required to build upon the work completed in Part A. The Critical Literature Review is a written report that presents and appraises previous research and theoretical perspectives related to your proposed study. It should describe the phenomenon you are researching, the context in which it occurs, and other factors contained in your research aim. It should document the connections you have made between the source texts that you draw upon and where you position your research among the existent literature. It should demonstrate to the reader that you have engaged with, understood and responded to the relevant body of knowledge underpinning your proposed research project. The Literature Review should summarise, critically evaluate, synthesise, and clearly link the literature to your proposed project.

For this assessment, you are required to focus on the following aspects:

1) highlight the gap in the existing research that needs to be filled;

2) contextualise your study in the theoretical literature;

Upon completion of the literature review section, you should be able to concisely define the problem you are investigating by finalising the research direction and freeze your research question(s) or hypothesis(es). You must provide your finalised research questions or hypotheses along with 3 to 5 research objectives in the last page of your report before the reference list.

Part C: Detailed Research Design

This part requires you to build upon the completed work in PPMP20015, critical literature review and finalised research questions that you have articulated in this unit. At this stage, you should have a clearly defined research project in consultation with your research supervisor. Guided by your examination of the research methodologies used by authors in the references you have cited earlier, you should be able to formulate a research design for your proposed research project.

This task requires you to describe the overall research strategy that you will employ to integrate the various components of your proposed research project in a logical and coherent manner. The research design must ensure that you will effectively address the research problem you have identified. Research approach and data collection methods should be detailed enough to describe how you intend to answer the research questions and achieve the research objectives. In this section, you should select and justify a methodological approach to solve the problem (i.e. qualitative, quantitative, mixed method). Then, you should include a set of investigative strategies or methods which is considered, coherent and appropriate to the outcomes that the project is designed to achieve. Will it be based on a survey, interviews, examination of secondary data or a combination of methods? And what are the reasons of choosing a certain method? If you are using a survey method, you should specify the target population, sampling plan, identification and access to participants, the methods and tools you will use to distribute the questionnaire and analyse collected data. You must also provide samples of the survey questions you intend to ask and demonstrate how the questions are aligned with your objectives. You must also complete the Ethics application if your research intends to collect data from people and include the application together with the required forms as an appendix to this part. You must also provide evidence of submitting the application to the Ethics Office for consideration.

Some references used in Part A&B may need to be further analysed in terms of the research design, methodology and methods/techniques that were utilised to collect and analyse data. This may help you to select the most appropriate research design for your proposed research project, it also allows you to track the research frontier in a specific area of research.

Part D: Project Management Documentation

As a project manager of the research project, you must track your progress by submitting fortnightly records including supervisory meeting records and updated project schedule to your supervisor. Towards the end of the project, you will submit all the accumulated documents in one zip file for assessment. Mainly, you must provide the following records:

1. A Risk Register and Stakeholder Analysis for the next and final phase.
2. A high-level project plan for the next and final phase.
3. Supervisory meeting records (a minimum of four records)
   
4. Fortnightly updated baseline schedule showing actual dates, planned dated and actual variance. (a minimum of four progress reports)
5. A reflective statement (200-300 words): summarising your experiences, feelings, reactions towards practising research project management in conducting this phase of your research and approaches to deal with incurred risks or delays and what resources or feedback you found to be helpful or unhelpful in managing your research project.

Part A: Annotated Bibliography

Assessment will be done according to the presentation, accuracy and coverage of the content for each aspect as set out under 'Task' section. Specifically, the following criteria will be used to assess your work:

• An introduction covering the context for selecting the references 10%.
• An analysis of the quality of references and credentials of authors 10%.
• Adequate and concise annotations with decent academic writing 30%.
• Clear linkage of each annotation to your proposed research topic 30%.
• Suitable formatting and layout for an annotated bibliography 10%.
• Correct spelling, grammar and referencing 10%.

Part B: Critical literature Review

Assessment will be done according to the presentation, accuracy and coverage of the content for each aspect as set out under 'Task' section. Specifically, the following criteria will be used to assess your work:

• An introduction explaining the approach and ambit of the conducted literature review 20%.
• Clear linkage of each identified theme or pattern in the literature to your proposed research topic 20%.
• Critical analysis of the literature 20%
• Well-articulated and logical research questions or hypothesis emerging from the review 20%
• Sound academic language, logical structure, organisation and smooth flow of the presented literature 20%.

Part C: Detailed Research Design

Assessment will be done according to the presentation, accuracy and coverage of the content for each aspect as set out under 'Task' section. Specifically, the following criteria will be used to assess your work:

• Clear linkage and alighnment between the proposed research questions, the research design, methodology and methods/techniques 20%.
• Analysis and justification of research methods/techniques 20%.
• justification of the suitability of the methods/techniques to the proposed research project 20%.
• Soundness and appropriateness of data collection instrument 20%.
• Sound academic language, logical structure, organisation and presentation of research design 20%.

Part D: Project Management Documentation

Assessment will be done according to your demonstration of project management skills throughout the project lifecycle which is evident via meeting all the given milestones, attending supervisory progress meetings, taking timely actions, mitigating risks, monitoring progress and updating project documentation. Extra mark will be awarded for taking the lead in identifying risks and taking effective corrective measures to keep the project on track. You will fail this part if there is evidence of poor project management skills by failure to meet most of the milestones, lack of engagement with the supervisor and superficial reporting and monitoring.