PART A
Assignment Content
Note: This assignment prepares you for the source research you are conducting for your Apply assignment due this week. Be sure to complete this practice assignment before starting the Apply assignment.
Constructing a rationale requires research, and research requires identifying unbiased sources of information. Clearly, you cannot rely on a company’s own marketing materials to be unbiased in its evaluation of its own products.
Write a 150-word response about how you will approach locating and vetting high-quality, unbiased sources of information when researching trends, vendors, and other easily hyped topics. How confident are you in your knowledge of identifying unbiased recommendations for a specific project type? Why?
PART B
Exam Content
Conducting research and preparing a report on the supporting information for your project serves two important purposes:
The researched report helps explain your choice of technologies in terms of business benefits and risks. This supported rationale is critical for executive approval.
A report reinforces or improves your plan—but only if you apply the results of your research to your plan. In the industry, project managers develop their plans iteratively, revising them as they conduct more research and identify better or cheaper alternatives. This iterative approach is especially relevant to IT projects because new technologies are developed and retired quickly.
This week, you are conducting research that provides additional information to support your project and writing a second draft of your project plan.
Conduct further research related to your project concerning:
Industry trends and history
Top technology vendors
Project management approaches
Development and deployment approaches
Analyses of impact and risks.
You may want to include Forbes and Harvard Business Review in your list of organizations to research.
Record your research findings in the Supporting Research Report template. Complete all sections in the Supporting Research Report template
Write a second draft of your project plan that you submitted in Week 2. Include the following in your second draft:
Identify 3 improvements you would recommend for the project based on your research in your updated draft.
Highlight the recommended 3 improvements in yellow and explain why you made the changes. You can include your explanation in parenthesis next to the change you made.
Please note that a grading rubric is used to grade this assignment. You can find the rubric in the section above the ‘Feedback for student’ area in Gradebook.
Supporting Research Report
35% of total grade
Improvement Recommendations
30% of total grade
Second Draft
30% of total grade
Writing
3% of total grade
APA Guidelines
2% of total grade
Submit both your Supporting Research Report and the second draft of your Project Plan.
