Final Assignment (Around 1000 words) Aside from completing the project as proposed in the business case, you will usually write a report if only to enable you to reflect on it and to learn from it. Usually the report is all the sponsor gets out of the project that they can use to show what they got for their money. The report should include the original business case, updated to reflect changes you may have made to it, and add the following sections. Conducting the Project Projects seldom unfold as planned and there will usually be some corrective actions along the way so you need to record what they were. With research that gathers data, for example, there will usually be some events that threaten the validity of the data gathering. Perhaps you planned to gather 30 samples from a random population but it happened that this was difficult so you gathered your samples from the first 30 people you met on the street. Are the data still valid? Or the data were planned to be stored in a specific repository but were stored somewhere else instead. What is much more likely is that the questions that made perfect sense to you before you started asking them didn’t make so much sense to the participants so you had to clarify the question. Is the survey still valid and are there differences between samples before the change and after the change. I’m sure all methods have their challenges when it comes to carrying them out. Those who read your report need to know how you did the work so they can assess the validity of the outcomes. Analysis and synthesis Once you have completed the data gathering or design or whatever, the question becomes “What does this all mean?” Your results must be analysed to provide credible and valid findings. You can’t simply look at the data and say “Obviously this supports what we thought.” How do you know the data support your hypothesis?. How do you know the design achieves what you set out to achieve? When eventually you get the results you must evaluate it against the original objectives. Does this result meet the objectives? It is usually more interesting when it doesn't because you learn a lot about the problem that way. Conclusions Next step is to wrap it all up with some conclusions. You have said what it all means but what can be concluded from that. Executive Summary The executive summary and an abstract serve the same purpose which is to tell the reader what is in the report so they can decide whether they need to read it. Usually the summary/abstract will state the problem, the method and the conclusions so the reader need read the body of the report only if they are curious about what went on in the project.