Managing your project

Managing your project is essential if you are to produce a piece of work worth handing in.  That meanssetting yourself a series of mini-deadlines in the run-up to the final submission date - and doing enough work to meet all of those deadlines.

Organise your work and plan your timetable by breaking the project down into separate activities. Most projects will divide into sections.  This list includes the most common sections.  Your project might not include all of them; it might require additional sections.  If you are not sure, check the module information or ask your supervisor.

• Description of the research question or design activity
• Preparation of a hypothesis
• Setting of aims and objectives to test this hypothesis
• Completion of the topic proposal form
• Literature search and review
• Investigation and data gathering
• Preparation of interim report and oral presentation
• Analysis and evaluation of the data or information
• Relation of the findings to the aims and objectives: drawing conclusions

Then there are key tasks once the research or project work has been completed:

• Preparation of the draft report
• Finalisation of the report
• Submission of the final report
• Oral examination and defence of the research (if required)

For an easy way to see how you could break your project down into sections and tasks, try the University of Minnesota's Assignment Calculator.  It asks you for the deadline date and subject area, then provides a breakdown of the likely sections and tasks, with mini-deadline dates and extra advice for each.

A word of warning:

The problem with the Assignment Calculator and lots of the other advice you will be offered is that it pretends that you are doing your dissertation and nothing else, and that you can finish one section or task completely before moving on to the next.