Guidelines for implementing an MBA dissertation project plan with the agile literature review approach

Guidelines for implementing an MBA dissertation project plan with the agile literature review approach.

From my experience as an MBA project supervisor, students, oftentimes, having produced their management-concerns diagram, theoretical framework level-0, level-1a, and level-c, are at loss of how to gather and analyse research findings in order to write up dissertation report chapter 4, 5 and 6. They appear to lose their sense of direction in developing the line of reasoning in their project works. So as to provide more concrete guidelines for these students to executive their project plan and dissertation writing work, I have formulated a set of guideline, primarily centered on the technique of "chain of evidence". The practice notes of "chain of evidence" are:

1. chain of evidence design and execution

2. the cloud of chain of evidence

3. making recommendations with the chain of evidence

There is also a dissertation sample with illustration on how to employ the "chain of evidence" technique in dissertation report writing (re: the sample report of John Cruise in the course google drive). If students have doubt about whether their current dissertation report draft work is heading in the right direction, they could also conduct a rapid test of quality as documented in my blog note. Using these guidelines should go some way to help students refine their line of reasoning in their dissertation report writing.

It should be noted that the implementation of dissertation project work requires reasonable grasps of the subject of research methods and the relevant management subjects involved. Especially, one very typical concern from students is that they are not clear how to conduct research interview and they feel that their interviewees are not serious in responding to their interview questions. In my view, studying the research method topic of interview research only goes some way to address their concern. Fundamentally, when a student is interviewing interviewees, e.g. to learn the viewpoints on the human resource management competence of their organization, the interviewer should have a quite good knowledge on the subject in order to have the required interview research competence. This implies that the student needs to do a lot of intellectual learning preparation in order to perform well in his/ her dissertation project work. As to the subject of research method, students could learn and do revisions by studying the e-resources as gathered in my blog note.

*** Let me remind students again that, as MBA students, they are expected to have a reasonably mastery of a number of management disciplines, notably on finance, operations management, marketing, strategic management, leadership and innovation/ change; in case they have not done further study and revision on these subjects, they should at least do some revision by studying some Youtube videos on these subjects to refresh their memory of these subjects.