Task Description

Project management discipline is continually evolving. There is currently an overwhelming body of research that was conducted to fill a knowledge gap by contributing to existing literature, improving processes or exploring best practices in various aspects of project management. This individual assignment tests your essential research competencies needed to plan for the execution of a research project around the given area of research. It primarily assesses your understanding of the conception and planning stage of the inquiry process.

This Supplementary Assessment requires you to develop a "Research Proposal" of up to 2200 words excluding references and appendices.

The assignment must be your own piece of work. You must not plagiarise, collude with others or get involved in contract cheating (i.e. by seeking help from friends or commercial providers in writing or helping you with this assignment).

Task

The assignment requires you to work independently and develop a proposal relating to an area of research around "Project Management Graduates in the Australian Market". You can use the supplied Research Topic Generation Tool to construct your focused topic. For example, you may construct a focused topic like: "Investigating the challenges facing project management graduates in the context of the construction sector in Melbourne".

You will conduct a literature search to identify relevant scholarly sources that have covered similar studies worldwide in the last few years. You will provide a review of the most two relevant scholarly articles. The review must start by commenting on the reliability of the selected articles with evidence. The review then should include a summary of the key arguments, findings and limitations of each article relevant to your research topic. You must paraphrase any sentence you cite by using your own words and. The review process should lead you to identify a potential gap or an opportunity that may warrant further research. You can distil this gap or opportunity from any explicit or implicit limitations, the recommendation of further research and flaws in any of the two articles.

Next, you must derive at least two research questions around the given topic. Your research questions are expected to be unique and different to other students undertaking the same project. Then, you are required to decide whether or not an in-depth interview method would be appropriate to answer your research questions. You must provide reasons for your decision, supported by evidence from the available resources in Moodle site, and propose an alternative method if applicable. Then, you must explain the data collection process in detail to answer your research questions.

You must provide a personal reflection statement to explain the extent upon which the project management methodology that you learnt in week 2 of Term 1 was helpful or unhelpful in undertaking this project. You must provide a hyperlink for the shared google folder containing your stored data in organised sub-folders. You must also provide the milestones list of the execution stage of the research that you may execute during Term 2.

You must note as part of this assessment, you may be required to attend a face to face interview to do a further written assessment to confirm your authorship and full understanding of the submitted work.

Specifications:

Your research proposal should not exceed 2200 words. The proposal must substantially include the following components:

1. The focused research topic around the given area of research.

2. A review of the two most relevant articles to the given topic. Start with the full reference of each article. (600 words).

3. Two research questions.

4. Justification of the need and significance of research (500 words)

5. Selection and justification of the research method (300 words).

6. Data collection process (400 words)

7. A Reflective Statement on adopting PM methodology in undertaking this project (300 words).

8. A hyperlink of the shared Google folder showing your organised data.

9. A Milestones List of all deliverables of the project as described in PPMP20016.

10. A list of used references including a direct hyperlink of the source at the bottom of each reference.