NOTE: This is an actual research proposal, based on the Office of Sponsored Research template. If you use this as a base for your own proposal, make sure that you change it appropriately. 

My notes to you are highlighted in yellow.

Things you'll need to change are highlighted in green.

Project Management in High-Tech Organizations: A Field Study

1. Title:

Project Management in High-Tech Organizations: A Field Study

1. Investigators (co-investigators)

Clay Spinuzzi, University of Texas at Austin

1. Hypothesis, Research Questions, or Goals of the Project

I seek to answer the following research questions:

• How do people in high-tech knowledge work organizations manage projects? What tools and texts do they use?
  
• How, and to what extent, do they collaborate in management?
• 
  
• How, and to what extent, do they share information?
• What training have they received?
• How has project management changed in their organization?
  

1. Background and Significance:

   NOTE: For this section, just give us a bit of background on the organization itself: What it does, how many people work there, why you think it would be an interesting place to study. 

In knowledge work organizations, work in which the primary product is knowledge, information that is continually interpreted and circulated across organizational boundaries. It tends to be organized in distributed, heterogeneous networks rather than in modular hierarchies such as those Marx described (1990). Whereas modular organization encouraged "silos" with rigid hierarchical separations and few connections, knowledge work encourages proliferating connections across trades, fields, and disciplines, connections across which texts circulate. These connections lead to more flexibility and collaboration within networked organizations, but also more communication problems: workers from historically separated activities suddenly must interact, collaborate, and learn enough of each others' social languages and genres to work together. Complexities become more difficult to manage, and everyone needs to learn a little about everyone else's work. 

High-tech organizations, such as software and web services companies, fit this description. Such organizations have faced new challenges in project management. Yet little research on project management has been done in the field of professional writing, particularly for knowledge work organizations such as those described here. 

In this exploratory qualitative study, I seek insight into how such organizations manage their projects in the course of performing knowledge work. Particularly, I want to know what tools and practices they use, to what extent they use them in the course of collaboration and planning, and to what extent these have changed other aspects of their organizations.

1. Research Method, Design, and Proposed Statistical Analysis:
   NOTE: Change this section to reflect your own research methods.

1. Data collection involves these methods for exploring consultants’ training and practices:

• Site interviews: Researcher will conduct one short (average .5 hour) semistructured interview with a manager before contacting participants. (see Appendix A for interview protocol.) Interviews will be audiorecorded.
  

• Pre-observational interviews: Researcher will conduct one short (average .25 hour) semistructured interview with each participant immediately before each observation to collect information about their professional biography and history with project management, collaboration, and related tools and practices. (See Appendix A for interview protocol.) Interviews will be audiorecorded.

• Naturalistic observations: Researcher will visit participants at work and conduct 1-2 short (average 1 hour) observations of each participant's work. During the observations, researcher will record events relating to project management, collaboration, information sharing, and training. Recordings will be in the form of detailed field notes.      
  

• System monitoring: Participants will be asked to optionally use system monitoring software RescueTime (rescuetime.com) for two weeks, starting with the observation and proceeding continuously until the end of the two-week period.  This software will record use of applications and websites and allow participants to tag these applications according to use. To preserve privacy, participants will be allowed to delete application and website data before turning over data. 

• Post-observational interviews: Researcher will conduct one semistructured interview with each participant immediately after each observation (average .5 hours). (See Appendix A for interview protocol.) Interviews will be audiorecorded.

•  Artifact collection: Researcher will collect artifacts from the designer's workplace that are related to project management, collaboration, information sharing, and training. Artifacts might include copies or photos of project lists, to-do lists, training documentation, generic contracts, screen shots, and email. To ensure privacy of others, participants will redact artifacts before turning the artifacts over to researcher (see Appendix B for redaction protocol).