Business Analytics Project Report
Summative Assignment Brief
Version April 2024
Coursework Administrative Details
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Module Name and Code: |
COMP41760 Business Analytics Project |
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Assignment Name: |
Project Report |
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Deadline for submission: |
2 p.m. 6 September 2024 |
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Deadline for marks and feedback to be returned to students: |
November 2024 |
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Submission instructions: |
You are to submit via Learn Ultra (TurnItIn- Feedback Studio) both of the following (as separate submission points/links): . Project report . Project log book |
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Submission file type(s) required: |
. BA Project Report (along with its appendices) must be a single electronic document, i.e. one PDF file. Maximum word count is 15000. . Project Log Book is to be submitted as a compressed (.zip or .rar) file. No limit to word count. |
1. Introduction
The purpose of the Business Analytics Project (BAP) is to provide you with the opportunity to conduct a substantial piece of academic work and to document this with a final piece of work that will demonstrate your analytical and reflective skills as well as your abilities in written communication. The overall aim of the BAP is to draw together and apply the knowledge, skills, and techniques that have been learned throughout the MSc programme.
The Business Analytics Project module (COMP41760) comprises two summative assignments: the Research Proposal and the BAP report. This document describes the detailed requirements for the BAP report.
The deadline for submission of the BAP report is 6 September 2024, 2 p.m.
1.1 How is the project organised?
The Business Analytics Project is a 60-credits module. The BAP report as a summative assignment weights 80% of the overall module mark.
The work for the project is spread across the following:
. Research Methods Workshops – Research Methods Workshops Handbook details the teaching staff, syllabus, and sessions;
. Meetings with an academic supervisor – up to 6 meetings, to a total of 4 contact hours;
. Meetings with a host organisation – one initial meeting to discuss the dataset and project scope, and, depending on the host organisation’s availability, additional progress meetings;
. Individual work on research, preparation, reading, analysis and writing up to a 15000 word project report.
There will be at least three people involved in the assessment of your project, reflecting its importance in the overall final mark (the project counts for 60 credits out of a total of 180 credits needed for the award of an MSc). These are: your supervisor, a second marker (i.e., internal examiner), and the external examiner who is responsible for overseeing the standards of the MSc programme.
The assessment criteria for the summative assignment - BAP report - are described in Section 2.6.
You will receive formative feedback before and during the project period through the regular supervisory meetings between student and supervisor. In addition, during the summer vacation period you will be expected to submit a draft of one chapter of the project on which you will receive formative feedback from your supervisor.
1.3 When does the project take place?
The project module is timetabled to run through the summer period. During this time, you should agree on the meeting times with your supervisor.
This section addresses the project process and procedures. Detailed questions about project procedures should normally be addressed to your supervisor.
2.1 Working with your Supervisor
Meetings with your supervisor will occur during the summer period (June – August), during which time you should meet up to 6 times. You should arrange the frequency of meetings with your supervisor. These should, however, add up to 4 contact hours.
Meetings should last approximately 30 minutes. It is expected that you will take the lead for each session, providing your supervisor with a summary of what has been achieved since the last meeting. You should then work together to identify what activities you should be undertaking to prepare for the next meeting. The supervisor can also decide to be proactive and schedule meetings with their supervisees.
The meetings can be held in-person (if the situation allows) or online (e.g., via Zoom or Teams), and any substantial email exchange can also be counted towards the meeting time, i.e., the 4 contact hours with your supervisor.
Records of project meetings. Use MS Teams to create a group, with access rights to your supervisor and host organisation contacts. In the MS Teams group, add an MS Planner (or Trello) application. Use the Gantt chart to present the schedule and timeline for your project to create a task list via MS Planner (or Trello).
For each project task/activity you should specify a start and end date to allow for progress tracking. You will use the Planner (or Trello) plan and task list to evaluate the progress of your project in each of the meetings with your supervisor and/or host organisation.
You are to add a “Meeting” task/activity to your plan for each of the meetings scheduled with your supervisor. These tasks will serve as records of project meetings. We suggest that, at the meetings with your supervisor, you ask them to provide feedback on:
. tasks that have been performed well
. those that need improvement
. to confirm the tasks that have been completed
. objectives for the next meeting.
You can include the received feedback as notes or comments within a specific task or within the “Meeting” tasks.
At the end of your project, you can export your project plan (task list) and include it in the Project Log Book that you will submit as part of this assignment.
2.2 Student, Supervisor and/or Project Sponsor Responsibilities
A successful project requires that all involved parties work effectively together.
Please note that projects proposed by academic staff, will not have a host organisation.
Responsibilities of the project sponsor (host organisation or an academic who proposed the project):
. To provide a business analytics topic/problem;
. To meet with the student and supervisor to explain the suggested topic, scope of the problem and desired deliverables from the student, as well as hand-over the data (or clearly specify the data source) the student is to use for their project;
. To meet (online, e.g., Zoom or MS Teams) with the student during the project duration (June – August) in up to three short meetings. These meetings will serve for students to report on the project progress or any preliminary results, and optionally for the company to provide feedback. However, note that it is not the host organisation’s responsibility to supervise the project or provide guidance.
Responsibilities of the supervisor are:
. To provide guidance about the nature of the project and the standard expected about planning of the project, about literature and sources, about conducting research, including ethical issues, and about any questions regarding plagiarism;
. To maintain contact via regular supervision meetings;
. To be accessible within reason at other times for providing advice to the student;
. To give detailed advice on project milestones;
. To ensure that a student is made aware of any inadequacy of progress, or of standards of work that fall below what is expected;
. To encourage the student to produce early draft sections, to comment on them critically, and to return the comments within recommended feedback timescales.
Responsibilities of the student are:
. To agree on a schedule of meetings with the supervisor and the host organisation; to attend the meetings or provide adequate notice if the
meetings need to be postponed;
. To take initiative in raising problems;
. To maintain the progress of the work in accordance with the milestones and the objectives agreed with the supervisor;
. To plan the project and to monitor progress against the plan;
. To keep a project log for recording results, ideas, references etc., where these are acquired as the project proceeds;
. To perform. the practical work, including data preparation, analysis and
results reporting, as well as write any code required to perform. these;
. To determine the contents of the project report and write the report;
. To share the Executive Summary with the host organisation at the end of the project.
In summary, the management of the project and the course that it takes are ultimately the student’s responsibility, with the supervisor acting as a guide.
The work of the project depends on the topic that a host organisation has proposed (or alternatively that DU’s academic staff has proposed) and which has been assigned to you to work on. Furthermore, it will draw upon the state of the art (related work review) and open questions that you identify from the reviewed literature. However, some generic types of activities that you are expected to perform. include:
Planning the project
. Develop a plan to manage and conduct the project from beginning to end. This will involve planning the activities and timing for the following: identifying an interesting and practical research question at an appropriate advanced level; choosing a method for answering the question; conducting the research, including managing all aspects of the research project; interpreting the results; being able to identify and manage any ethical issues that might arise.
. The project plan is essentially your strategy for producing the deliverables and will include a timetable with some milestones as well as an outline plan for how you will evaluate your project to demonstrate what has been achieved.
Literature and related work review
. Search for and identify important literature and open questions in business analytics.
. Critically analyse and write a review of the related work.
Research design
. Identify, select, justify and implement business analytics research methods, particularly focusing on data preparation and data analysis methods.
Data analysis and results interpretation
. Prepare, pre-process and analyse the collected or obtained data by applying the appropriate methods for answering the research questions.
. Interpret, evaluate and discuss the results of your analysis and their implications.
Ethical considerations
. Appreciation of ethical issues and commercial sensitivity (e.g., access to data, non-disclosure agreements, etc.) in business analytics research. Every student must discuss the ethical considerations of their project with the supervisor. If there are ethical considerations which need to be addressed, the student must submit the Ethical Assessment Form. (see
Section 2.7), and adhere to the University’s Intellectual Property Policy.
The deliverables for BAP report comprise:
i. BAP Report of 15000 words. Details about the structure and formatting are discussed in Section 3. Note that the length guidelines will be adhered to strictly and that markers will ignore anything exceeding this word limit. You are to submit the report as a PDF file.
ii. Project Log Book including the source code for any software produced for the project and data used for analysis, where appropriate. You are to submit this as a compressed (.zip or .rar) file.
iii. Executive Summary should be included at the beginning of your BAP
Report. You are expected to send the Executive Summary to the host organisation as a separate PDF file on 6 September 2024.
The deliverables that form. the BA Project assignment must be submitted by the following deadlines:
. Approximately mid-July 2024 - one chapter of the BAP report on which you will receive formative feedback from your supervisor. Email the submission to your supervisor. In agreement with your supervisor, you can submit this formative assignment by an alternative date.
. 6 September 2024 by 2 p.m. make three submissions: written BAP Report and Project Log Book (both submitted via Learn Ultra), and separately email the Executive Summary as a PDF file to your host organisation.
Late reports will not be accepted without a penalty, unless an extension is approved. If a project is submitted after the deadline, the University-wide scheme for applying penalties to late work will be applied. In particular, machine or word-processing problems will not be accepted as an excuse for late submission.
A major objective of the project is to allow you to exercise the learned skills and knowledge in business analytics.
For the BAP Report you should submit a written report and a project log file. Nevertheless, it is mainly the 15000 word written report that will be marked and used to determine the mark for the BAP Report assignment.
The report will be assessed on the following marking criteria.
2.7 Statement of Original Work and Ethics Approval
Students are required to provide a signed Declaration of originality that is worded as follows:
“I declare that all assessed work to be submitted for my degree will be the results of my own work except where group work is involved. In the case of a group project, the work will be prepared in collaboration with other members of the group. In all other cases, material from the work of others will be suitably acknowledged and all quotations and paraphrasing will be suitably indicated.”
Within the project report and all other documents you must clearly acknowledge any work that is included that is not original (i.e. your own), including making clear how much, if any, of the code of your project is not original. If necessary, any declarations that materials (documents and/or source code) are not your own unaided work should also be included. All references to the work of others, published or otherwise, should be clearly identified in the text using quotation marks and citation.
For the ethics approval process:
1. Every student must discuss with their supervisor about any ethical
considerations of their project.
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2. If there are ethical considerations which need to be addressed, the student must submit the Ethical Assessment Form online, using the following link: https://forms.ethics.durham.ac.uk/ |
In some cases (e.g. when gathering sensitive data from human participants), the student might also need to create additional documents for the parties involved (e.g. consent form, privacy notice, participant leaflet).
3. Submitted ethics applications are reviewed and approved by the supervisor
and the Ethics Committee representative(s).
4. The student can start with their research only upon receiving an official
approval for the ethics application .
Note that if at any point during the project (other) ethical issues arise, a new ethics application has to be submitted and approved.
2.8 Selecting Appropriate Software
The major software components may already have been specified by the topic of the project. This may also need to be organised well ahead of the starting date so that any necessary licenses can be obtained, versions checked etc. In such a situation, it is often quite infeasible to change these decisions once the project has started.
However, many projects will still require choices to be made for the use of specific types of software tools. When selecting appropriate software that is part of the project, you need to be able to specify the reasons for your choice in an objective manner when reporting.
A student may use his or her own computer for part or all of the practical work involved in a project, provided that it is suitable for the purpose (as agreed with the supervisor) and that any proprietary software used is properly licensed. If you are using your own computer, the responsibility for backups etc. lies entirely with yourself.
2.9 Some Useful Hints for a Successful Project
The following list is intended to indicate some points to assist you in the management and presentation of your projects.
. Start on the task of background reading and literature search early, preferably at the Research Methods workshop and for the Research Proposal assignment. If this is left until later, it will be hard to make up lost time.
. Make the most of your supervisor’s knowledge by preparing for meetings and asking questions (it is often helpful to prepare a shortlist before the meeting). Don’t waste meeting time by asking questions about organisational issues such as those addressed in this handbook, concentrate on the issues that are important for your project.
. Remember that the project constitutes a substantial piece of work, hence examiners will be looking for major progress on the chosen task and substantial deliverables.
. Remember that the project report carries much weight in the marking process. Start drafting this in goodtime and use checklists to ensure that key issues are addressed.
. Pay adequate attention to the Data Analysis and Results section of your project report.
. Use data visualisations in your report. Explain the use of symbols (lines, boxes etc.) in any diagrams.
. Pay due attention to style. and grammar. In particular, do not use the first person singular, such as “I did…”, or “…by me”.
. Ensure that the report has an appropriate level of academic content. In particular, do not make unsubstantiated assertions (e.g. “most users of the internet make use of…”) and ensure that any conclusions are logically linked to your results.
. Try to ensure a consistent level of abstraction in your report, avoiding excessive detail (or a complete absence of any). Put yourself into the shoes of the reader who is not familiar with you or with your project. A report should form. a ‘narrative’ that takes the reader through the stages of your project from the first ideas (why do this) to the outcomes of final evaluation (was it successful or useful to have done it?).
. Every project sets out to investigate something within a particular context and hence is seeking to answer some important question (we usually try to provide a concise statement of this in the introduction and refer to it as the ‘research question’). You should ensure that at the end of your report you report back on your findings about the research question (which is not just a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer, but rather interpretation and discussion).
2.9.1 Hints for Conducting the Literature Review
There are different approaches that can be used to undertaking a literature review, and the one that you use should be that which is most suitable for the project that you are undertaking. At one extreme, a review can be conducted as a systematic review using formalised search strings (or “key words”) and a pre-selected group of electronic databases of papers. At the other, it can be an expert review that is largely based upon papers that are identified by your supervisor as being particularly relevant. In many cases it will fall between these, with your supervisor suggesting where key literature might be found, search strings that might help, etc. How to perform. a literature review and reference the selected literature will be addressed in the Research Methods workshop.
However, in your project report you should disclose the following aspects of how you undertook the review of literature and related work:
1. You should describe the review methods. This should explain clearly
how you set about your review and the criteria used for selecting publications that you have included in the review. If you used electronic search engines, then you should identify which ones were used and the search terms and parameters employed for each one. If your material was recommended by others (such as your supervisor) then make this clear too. Overall, the task of this section is to explain why this set of documents is the most relevant ones for your purpose.
. The provenance of the material found needs to be established. For published books and papers this is not a problem (for example, for a journal paper you will need to identify which journal, the volume, issues, year, pagination etc.). Information that is only available on the web, perhaps as a technical report or similar, needs to be treated with care.
. If you have undertaken some experimental work with particular software packages or tools, in order to determine whether or not they might be used in your project you should again give appropriate details.
2. You should critically analyse the selected literature. This provides the
underpinning for the project and should identify and summarise a number of key pieces of literature relevant to your project topic. These might address different aspects of the project: some may be concerned with the technical question that the project is addressing; others might be concerned with the choice of tools, methods, results, etc.
3. Referencing. You should apply the Harvard referencing style. in-text
and in the list of references. Typically, you should identify around 15-20 key references.
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