A Business Students Guide

Working on a research project is often a challenge. And this book helps negotiate some tricky bits.

Designing and Managing a Research Project:
A Business Students Guide
Michael Jay Polonsky and David S Waller
Response Books
2004
Pages: 232
Price: Rs 320
ISBN: 81-7829-459-1
Paperback

Learning through projects is the trademark of business education throughout the world. Arguably it is a better method of acquiring knowledge (especially through group projects) compared to plain vanilla classroom lectures or even case studies based learning. Learning in the former rests primarily on the teaching abilities of the teacher and is hardly participatory and in the latter it rests solely on the student to learn whatever she can from analysing the case. Therefore, any book which simplifies the subject of business school projects is worth reading. Of course, there is a lot available on the subject already but Messrs Polonsky and Waller have tried to focus on the subject from the student's perspective and have shared their valuable experience as instructors in doing so.

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The book is conveniently divided in to three parts, each focusing on a fundamental segment of a business school project. Therefore, a project group which is already in the middle of a project can directly go to the part more relevant to the stage their project is in at the moment. Instructors too can select some chapters from the book and ask their students to compulsorily read them before embarking on their projects. A full cover to cover reading would be good but it might not always be possible for students faced with a three month semester with 7-8 courses and project completion a requirement for each one of them.

Part I of the book introduces the topic. There are chapters on choosing a topic for the project, the role of the supervisor (the school instructor or the manager under whose supervision the students might be working in an external organisation), group dynamics and the role of conflict and finally, ethical considerations. Each one of the chapters justifies reading for some useful bit of wisdom offered by the authors. For example, in chapter three, under the heading 'Multiple Supervisors' the authors have forewarned students working on projects for real companies.

While the benefits from such real life projects are tremendous (project team members might be able to do some useful networking to get a job after their course is over), the downside is that the company itself might treat students as cheap or even free labor for some of the things they don't have bandwidth for. In such situations, the companies may ignore the project objective which is student learning and force the students to carry out tasks which deviate from it.