Assignment Content Conducting research and creating a supporting research report serves two important purposes with respect to your project: It explains your technological choices in terms of business

Assignment Content

Conducting research and creating a supporting research report serves two important purposes with respect to your project:

1. It explains your technological choices in terms of business benefits and risks. This explanation is crucial for executive approval.
2. It either reinforces or improves your plan--but only if you apply the results of your research to a new draft of your plan. In the industry, project managers develop their plans iteratively and change 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 forced to retire at a very quick pace.

For this assignment, you will conduct research and create a supporting research report. Then, based on your research, you will identify and explain the rationale for three improvements to the project plan you submitted last week.

Download the Supporting Research Report template.

Conduct additional research on your project's industry, recommended technology vendors, and the categories presented in the Supporting Research Report. You may want to include the Gartner Group and Forrester Research in your list of organizations to research.

Complete the Supporting Research Report template.

Create a second draft of your project plan. Highlight in yellow the three changes you made to the second draft based on the in-depth research you conducted this week, and explain why you made the changes.

Submit both your Supporting Research Report and second draft of your project plan.

Please note that I do not consider simply parroting back material from another source to be sufficient - you will need to provide your material in your own words and discuss or describe how any external material you provide relates to the scenario. Also, please make sure you properly paraphrase, quote, reference and cite any material you are discussing.