Research in Business

Topic - "Maintaining Performance during Organizational Changes: Causes of Changes, Impact on Performance and Ways to Maintain Performance"

Guidelines for Assessment (Project Proposal)

1. I am expecting not more than 3000 words for this assignment (except references and appendix) and this assignment should be consistent with the topic of your Assignment 1. If you like to change your topic, you MUST need permission from your course coordinator.

2. Structure of the Assignment

- Introduction
- Problem Statement
- Research objectives/questions
- Justification of the project
- Expected research output/outcome
- Conceptual framework and research hypothesis
- Methodology
- Organisation of the study
- Gantt chart
- References
- Appendix (if any)

- Introduction: I expect about half a page or a maximum one page for an introduction i.e., highlights the issue that you will further explore in your current study followed by organisation of this assignment. Note that organisation of the study is different from organisation of the assignment. Organisation of the assignment is how you will organise this Assignment-3 but organisation of the study is how you will organise the whole study.

- Problem statement: A discussion of current practices or state of knowledge of the issue that you have highlighted in the introduction section followed by exploring what is the main problem within the issue. For example, a fall in sales of a food product can be an issue in Australian retail market but quality of the product or the product promotion and management within the industry/company is a problem that needs to be addressed. Therefore you need to substantiate the problem with evidence and arguments.

- Research aim and objectives/research questions: Research aim and objectives are often confused each other. Research aim is what your overall goal of the study is and then you need to consider some objectives or tasks that help to achieve your goal. However, your overall aim of the study should be linked with the problem that you indentified in the section above. Some researchers like to use research questions instead of research objectives. However, each research objectives can have one or more than one research questions.

- Justification of the project and expected research outcome: First Project justification is about trying to explain why the problem is so important that it requires further investigation.

Second how your study objectives can bring some reasonable solution to address the problem.
Third how will the expected outputs of the study be used and who will be the beneficiaries.

- Conceptual framework and research hypothesis: Here you need to do an in-depth literature review on:
o Prior ‘related' theory - concepts and relationships that are used to represent the world, what is happening and why.
o Prior ‘related' research - how people have tackled ‘similar' problems and what they have learned.
o Other theory and research - approaches, lines of investigation and theory that are not obviously relevant/previously used.
Then you need to come up with couple of research hypotheses that you like to test in this study and these can be quantitative or qualitative hypotheses. However, you should have logical flow of you research aim and objectives with your research hypothesis. If not, then you must need to review your problem statement and research aim and objectives.

- Methodology: Here first you need to tell what methodology you will consider for this study such as quantitative, qualitative or a mixed methodology. Second you should provide some details of data collection and analysis methods. Third provide a direction about how you will conclude or discuss your findings.

- Organisation of the study: As described above, how you will organise the whole study such as first you will do a project proposal, second you will do conceptual framework and methodology of the study, and third you will do data analysis and discussion and at the end of the project you will do a chapter on conclusion and recommendations based on your study findings.

- Gantt chart: It is a one kind of bar chart and you need to mention your start and finish dates for each tasks. You can use project task and milestone table if you are not familiar with Gantt chart.