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Initial Project Plan

The final year project is a substantial part of your degree. It can have a major effect on the degree class you are awarded and even whether or not you pass the degree. The initial project plan is to make sure you understand what your project requires you to do and how you are going to finish it successfully. You must submit an initial project plan at the beginning of the first semester of your project (the deadline for this is listed in your PATS account under the project description).

The initial project plan must be approved by your supervisor and moderator. Therefore, you should discuss the plan with your supervisor and moderator before you submit it to make sure both of you agree on what your project entails. You should further check the project plan with your moderator, but the first person to talk about it is usually your supervisor.

We suggest that you write an initial version of your project plan and arrange meetings with your supervisor and moderator to discuss it and revise the plan. If you are not sure what to write in the plan, please first discuss this with your supervisor. Once your supervisor and moderator are happy with your plan, submit it to PATS and they can officially approve it there. As you can resubmit the plan via PATS multiple times, you can also submit a draft and your supervisor and moderator can look at it there and even leave comments. However, unless there are exceptional circumstances (e..g supervisor or moderator may be away), we highly recommend to discuss the plan in person and not just in PATS or by e-mail.

Finally, note that this is an initial plan, and you can, and most likely should, adjust the plan as you progress. Note, however, that with the initial plan you are prescribing what you intend to deliver at the various stages of the project (in particular for the final and, if applicable, interim report).

For information about how to submit your initial plan via pats please see the Submission Guide.

Structure and Contents

For the initial plan one to at most two pages text are sufficient. It should contain the following information:

Project Title

The title of the initial plan document should be “Initial Plan” followed by the title of your project. List yourself as author and also say who your supervisor and moderator is.

Project Description

The first section of the document should be a brief description of your project outlining its context and what it is overall about. You can adapt the original project description used to select your project there. There is no need to describe a lot of detail there and this would usually not be longer than half a page.

Project Aims and Objectives

The second section of the document should be a list of top-level aims and objectives for your project. These are statements of what you set out to achieve with your project. Try to be as specific as possible here at this stage, but avoid getting into too many details that may change later. A list of some top-level bullet points with at most one level of sub-points is usually sufficient.

For Projects with Final Report Only

If you are taking module CM0300, CM0333 or CM0400 your aims and objectives are what you expect to have at the end of the module for your final report.

For Projects with Interim and Final Report

If you are taking module CM0343 you should also clearly indicate what you expect to include in the interim report and the final report. Note that the contents of the interim report should not be repeated in the final report. You may think of the interim report as volume I and the final report as volume II of your overall project report. Your final deliverables (e.g. any final versions of software you developed) form part III of the project.

What to include in the two reports depends on the nature of your project. Your interim report should provide the results of the first stage of the project, representing about 25% of the total project work. This would usually be the results of the background study and a detailed analysis of the problem with a description of an approach of how to address the problem. For some projects, e.g., it may also contain an initial version of a final deliverable or some other building block of the overall project.

The final report then contains the overall project findings and achievements and the complete set of deliverables developed for the project to account for 75% of the complete project. The report should not repeat the contents of the interim report, but may refer to it and expand on it.

Your project plan effectively defines what should go into which report. Hence, you should carefully discuss this with your supervisor to make sure there is enough for 25% in the interim report and you neither try to do too much or too little for the interim report.

Work Plan

The last section of your plan should consist of a time plan stating what you are working on when. This should include clear milestones of what you expect to achieve by which date and also show how you intent to achieve these milestones. Make sure the deliverables for the final (and interim) report clearly link with your time plan, such that you can actually deliver them when they are due.

You are free to choose the work plan format that you think is best suited for your project. This may be in a GANTT chart format, but sometimes it may also be fine to simply list in sequence what you are working on. Usually a weekly scale for the plan is a good choice. Take note of the deadlines for the deliverables as listed in your PATS project description when you develop the work plan.

Approval Procedure

Once you have discussed your project plan with your supervisor and moderator and have submitted it on PATS, both, your supervisor and moderator, must approve your plan on PATS as well. They can also choose to leave any comments with your plan. You will see the comments and the approval as soon as they have done this.

You can resubmit your plan at any time until the deadline listed. Should you resubmit a plan that has already been approved, the approval will be removed and the new plan must be approved again.

After the submission deadline your supervisor and moderator can still approve the plan, edit their comments, etc. and in very special cases even remove approval (they should get in contact with you to discuss if they choose to do this). They can do this until about one week after the plan submission deadline. After this approval deadline they cannot undo any approval (but still approve your plan in case there is any delay, just that approval will then be final).

In case you fail to submit your plan by deadline or wish to resubmit a plan after the submission deadline, please get in contact with the project coordinator to discuss this.

initial_plan.1317565045.txt.gz · Last modified: 2011/10/02 15:17 by scmfcl