MGMT 8910M Week 11 Forward Plan Example

Six Months Out, Every Estimate Halved: A Forward Plan for a Dissertation on Telehealth Decisions in Rural Primary Care Clinics, With a Month-by-Month Table, a Register of Frozen and Open Chapters and the Work That Fills Any Month in Which Approval Stalls

Student Name

Walden University

MGMT 8910M: Dissertation Development Process

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Six Months Out, Every Estimate Halved: A Forward Plan for a Dissertation on Telehealth Decisions in Rural Primary Care Clinics, With a Month-by-Month Table, a Register of Frozen and Open Chapters and the Work That Fills Any Month in Which Approval Stalls

Why Every Estimate Is Halved

This term's progress memo recorded that I produced about half the pages I planned: 9 of 18 in the first stretch and, across the whole term, 41 of 80. The first draft of this plan assumed the planned rate. Every output estimate below has therefore been halved from that draft. Buehler et al. (1994) showed that people continue to predict optimistic completion times even when they recall that past tasks ran late, so the plan does not rely on my sense that next term will be different; it relies on the record.

Month-by-Month Plan

Table 1

Forward Plan, Months 1 to 6 After the Term

Output estimates are half of those in the plan's first draft. Gates marked "assumed but not controlled" are windows the plan depends on but cannot shorten.

Frozen and Open Register

Table 2

Status of Each Chapter

Frozen does not mean finished. It means that a change has a cost, which the register makes visible.

Why Freeze Two Chapters

Chapters one and two were accepted by the chair this term, and every change to them during the term set off a round of changes elsewhere, the ripples recorded in the feedback log. Freezing them does not forbid revision. It means that any change must go through the same steps as before: log the reason, make the change, and recheck the passages that depend on it. The rule is meant to stop the habit identified in the progress memo, revising accepted sections instead of producing new ones. Lovitts (2008), in focus groups with faculty about doctoral students who did and did not make the transition to independent research, reported that students' difficulty in moving from coursework to their own research was a recurring theme; the register is one small structure for keeping the research moving.

Contingency

If research review or ethics approval stalls, the month is not empty. The work that fills it, in order, is: drafting the interview protocol and testing it with one clinic manager outside the sample; building the initial coding frame from the literature in chapter two, so coding can begin as soon as transcripts exist; writing the data management plan; and drafting the description of the setting in chapter four, which depends only on public information about rural clinics. Gollwitzer (1999) found that stating in advance when and how one will act on a goal helps people follow through when circumstances change; the contingency list is that statement for the months the plan cannot control.

References

Buehler, R., Griffin, D., & Ross, M. (1994). Exploring the "planning fallacy": Why people underestimate their task completion times. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(3), 366-381. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.67.3.366

Gollwitzer, P. M. (1999). Implementation intentions: Strong effects of simple plans. American Psychologist, 54(7), 493-503. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.54.7.493

Lovitts, B. E. (2008). The transition to independent research: Who makes it, who doesn't, and why. The Journal of Higher Education, 79(3), 296-325. https://doi.org/10.1080/00221546.2008.11772100