Project Proposal discussions

A main component of the ARMPD assignment consists of the Project Proposal that shoyld be submitted. We were advised to devise this proposal targeting our final year project (FYP) so that it will be convenient and we can be prepared for the next year. Therefore much thought and effort were given in order to select the ideal project for everyone.

The lecturer requested the students to investigate into potential organizations or areas for a suitable problem and sessions were held to discuss and to obtain feedback. For about a week, every student brought forward the ideas that they discovered in order to obtain an approval. However none of the students managed to satisfy the necessary criteria for the ideas to be stable and to be continued further. However feedback was given by the lecturer as to the methods of determining and improving the problems. Similar examples, past project ideas were discussed in order for the students to obtain a correct idea to pursue and investigate into issues.

The author too researched and investigated into areas where a potential problem idea existed. The author visited several companies such as a glove manufacturing company, jewelry manufacturing company, sports good exporting company and a transformer manufacturing company. However none of the problems managed to be successful

Company	Area investigated/ problem discovered	Reasons for futility
Glove manufacturing company	Document management and transfer which was done through outdated methods	Inexistence of a focused problem and effects to the company, less scope, common idea
Jewelry manufacturing company	Manufacturing process which was manual at present	Too trivial as there are many off the shelf systems available as remedies
Sports goods exporting company	Order management and document transfer which was done through outdated methods	Inexistence of a focused problem and effects to the company, less scope, common idea
Transformer manufacturing company	Determining customer and order stability in the future	Less scope as the company already possesses the ability to determine forecasts

After the initial discussions, students were given a deadline in order to submit a draft problem statement. Before submission of the draft, a sample problem statement format was given and some class activities were conducted so that the students were trained to write a correct problem statement. These statements were read and corrected by the lecturer and feedback was given for improvement. 

The author further investigated and finally managed to obtain a problem in the glove manufacturing company pertaining to the production process. The production scheduling was inefficient leading to delay in delivery of goods. Therefore the author produced this as a problem statement which was evaluated by the lecturer and feedback was given, where a lot of issues were advised to be dealt with.

As the next step, the project proposal draft was submitted in accordance with the problems taken by the students. Here too a sample format was given to the students as a guideline. The process of discussing project proposals was an unpleasant task as none of the students had managed to submit a proper report. After much stern advices and reproach from the lecturer in order to rectify our mistakes, students were able to struggle into arrive at an acceptable project proposal which helped in carrying on with the rest of the assignment.

The author’s project proposal was rejected spot on by the lecturer as it wasn’t up to standard. Many comments and criticism was provided and guidelines on how to proceed were communicated by the lecturer. This helped the author in drafting an acceptable proposal which can be used to build upon and worked ahead.

Even though at the beginning of the module the students were aware of the gravity of writing an appropriate project proposal which is FYP standard, the difficulty of that task wasn’t felt till it was actually done by the students. However the author thinks that it is indeed a good foundation that such a task is done before the actual FYP proposal is submitted so that students have more time to attain a solid ground and produce satisfactory and quality work.