Two basic desirable features of a well formulated research objective in the agile literature review approach

Two basic desirable features of a well-formulated research objective in the agile literature review approach [in the context of doing an MBA dissertation project]:

Obsessed with the direct management issues on hand, some MBA students tend to formulate research objectives in a concrete implementation [using direct empirical details: code-based] tone such as:

To evaluate the capability of the ABC inventory management system version 4 for XYZ Ltd.

To start with, such a research objective is difficult to serve as an agenda to do literature review, because it is very rare that there are academic articles on evaluating ABC inventory management system.

Above all, there are two related desirable features of a well-formulated research objective:

1. The research objective should be associated explicitly or implicitly with certain theories, themes, and/or management topics, e.g.. managerial competence, innovation capability, strategic change management, organizational design, etc..

2. The research objective, being derived from 1-2 management concerns, should preferably represent an intellectual response that is in line with the MBA education programme spirit, in terms of strategic thinking, and innovation/ strategic change-orientation. Thus, "to evaluate how to improve the reliability of the customer order processing task of Department A [product line 123] in Fanling" is not quite an interesting topic, while "to evaluate the customer service performance" of ABC Ltd is a more interesting topic as it is more clearly aligned with the MBA education programme spirit. Or to put it in a simple way, the research objective should preferably be an intellectual response to a specific management concern at the strategic or tactical level, rather than predominantly at the operational level.

To formulate a desirable research objective requires managerial intellectual competence via engaged managerial intellectual learning over time. There are additional agile literature review guidelines from the ALRA publication to consider to make the research objectives more desirable.

Note:

In the agile literature review approach, management concerns are depicted in the management-concerns diagram while research objectives appear in the theoretical framework diagram set (i.e. level-0, level-1a, level-1b [optional] and level-1c).