School of Engineering and Information Technology
Faculty of Science and Technology
Before you study the unit SEB322 ‘Research and Design Project Management’ you will need to have a suitable final year engineering or technology project and an academic supervisor. This site supports you in achieving this and also in the development of your project proposal. Key skills needed to develop major components of your final year project proposal, such as the literature review and planning documents, form a significant part of the unit SEB322
You are required to submit the final year project proposal and safety documents at the commencement of your enrolment into SEJ441 or SEJ342. Any delay in submitting the proposal and safety documents will severely limit your available time to appropriately develop your project. (It is recommended that you withdraw from SEJ441 or SEJ342 if you are unable to submit these documents within the first 2-3 weeks of enrolment and enrol again the following semester with the documents completed.)
Mouse clicking on the titles shown in blue font in the sections below can access the relevant documents.
1. The initial task is to broadly define a suitable project concept. For this you should first read the Preliminaries topic from 'Planning Your Final Year Project'-one of the study modules for SEB322. This topic makes reference to readings provided by the Deakin Technology Management Centre- 'Research Procedures' and 'Project Selection'-that, whilst useful, are not essential for your preparation and thus not provided here. If you intend to approach an industrial partner for an appropriate final year project please print off Industry Projects Partner flyers (available from this site) and present a copy to suitable personnel in the company you wish to approach.
2. The second task is to find a suitable academic supervisor. Also provided on this site are excel spreadsheets of staff interests (staff contact details can be obtained by clicking on the second tab along the bottom of the sheets). From these spreadsheets you should determine the most suitable academic staff member to supervise your project and contact that person to discuss the potential of your concept for the final year project and further refine your concept. Be prepared for a supervisor to decline to supervise if their supervision load is already too great or they feel the project is outside their field of expertise. However, if, after trying all suitable academic supervisors, you are still unsuccessful, please contact your stream leader.
Preparation of the project proposal is covered in the topic Devising the Detailed Plan from 'Planning Your Final Year Project'. The steps in developing the proposal are:
1. Search for related literature to your project from which to develop your literature review. For your thesis this must include journal articles or conference papers derived from the index and abstract and/or full text electronic databases of the library. The US patent, European patent and Australian patent web sites may also provide useful information.
2. Develop the literature review. Refer to the chapter on writing the literature review in your textbook (Leedy).and the library guide to writing the literature review (on this site).
Develop the methodology. This is essentially a reasoned step by step report on how you propose to carry out the project. It should be written in parallel with the development of the following project management tools:
Critical path analysis
Gantt chart
Loading diagram
Resource and costing analysis
The first three are briefly described in the reading by Gibbings Some general procedures for planning experiments. A more detailed coverage of project planning is presented in SEB322. If available, project management software such as Microsoft Project may be used.
Resources and costing analysis is described in 'Devising the detail plan' linked above.
Guidance in the presentation of reports (and particularly referencing) is given in the document Guidelines for the Presentation of Project Reports and Theses available in Study Resources.
Mr Andrew Redman, a graduate of this school, has provided a good example of a project proposal. (Due to software incompatibility, it is not possible to display his project management tools.) A well-thought out proposal complete with full project planning tools (network analysis, Gantt chart and Loading diagram) is essential to prevent the inevitable extensive delays that historically have taken place with students who have not completed this preparation.
The following are links to other documents referred to above
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