38008 Research Analysis and Supply Chain Management Assignment Coursework Brief 2026 | UoB

38008 Assignment

Assignment Title

You Will Identify a research problem that you think would make a suitable subject for either a research dissertation or business project, and then write a research proposal around it.

For the purposes of selecting your research problem, you are free to draw on any of the modules/topics that you have covered in the programme. For this exercise, you may find it useful to select a research problem that is close to the final dissertation\business project that you intend to write. However, this doesn't have to be the case.

Assignment

A Research proposal is a structured plan for an intended piece of research. The Purpose of producing one is to allow researchers to reflect on their research idea before committing to undertaking the research itself. Undertaken properly, it should include the what, why, how, when and where of what you intend to do.

Accordingly, a good research proposal will typically include the following elements:

• An explanation of what the research is about, why it is being undertaken, and why it is worth undertaking.
• As part of the above, a statement of the main research objectives/questions
• An account of how the research relates to work previously undertaken, and what it hopes to contribute (which, in the case of a business project, will be its application to a real-world context/problem)
• A summary of the framework(s) and/or theories that the research intends to draw upon
• An outline of the research design.
• An outline of the data that the researcher believes that they will need to complete the research, and an indication of how/where the data will be obtained
• Some analysis of the issues/risks that the researcher is likely to encounter (e.g. access to research participants, potential issues with data quality, etc.)
• A plan to manage potential issues/risks
• A timeline for completing the research.

In terms of assessing the quality of a research proposal, beyond ensuring that the above are covered, your examiners will be checking your work for a combination of its (a) coherence; (b) its academic rigour; and (d) the potential quality of its contribution (contribution to knowledge or practice) whether to original knowledge (research dissertation) or operational performance (business project). Your examiners will also be checking to ensure that there is a proper consideration of any ethical issues.

In terms of structure, typically, a research proposal is expected to be organised as follows:

• Research title
• Background (where you explain the research problem, provide the rationale, and locate your research problem within the existing academic literature)
• Summary of the overarching research aims/objectives/investigative questions
• Methods (where you explain your research philosophy, approach to data collection, and your plan for collecting, curating and analysing data once you have collected it)
• Timescales
• Resource Plan
• References

Module Learning Outcomes

In this assessment, the following learning outcomes will be covered:

• LO 2. To Support Students in undertaking research, whether for an academic or a business practitioner audience
• LO 3. To support students in collecting and analysing data for research
• LO 4. To support students in producing research outputs, whether for academia or a practitioner audience

Grading Criteria

The research proposal addresses all of the key areas/issues. Strong proposals will provide a detailed account of the research theme, the reason for undertaking the research, and an account of the literature to be reviewed/framework to be applied. They will describe a rationale for the data to be collected, an account of how it is to be collected, as well as an indication of how the researcher intends to collate and analyse their data. The proposal will also offer a detailed and compelling risk assessment and management strategy. Weak proposals will be significant in several of the categories above. Intermediate proposals may include all of the above. However, particular aspects of the research will not be covered in sufficient depth and/or there may be questions about how joined up the proposal is as a whole.

The proposal is academically rigorous. Even in the case of business projects, the research is still expected to be academically rigorous. For a traditional dissertation, a strong proposal will locate the research within a clear theoretical, ontological and epistemological tradition, and have a clear data collection and analysis strategy that gives confidence about the likely robustness of any results/findings. In the case of business projects, some of the same issues will remain highly pertinent (particularly those related to how the project is situated within a broader body of literature). However, strong proposals will be very clear about the challenges of collecting and analysing data in the context of working closely with a sponsor and indicate a clear awareness of some of the risks that will need to be mitigated/managed (again, to give confidence in any of the results)

The proposal is practical/feasible. Strong proposals will show clear evidence that the objectives of the research are achievable and that the author is clear about how they intend to achieve them. Here, the importance of having a clear research plan, timelines and a risk mitigation/management strategy will be critical. Weak proposals will typically be weak in this regard. The researcher may well have a clear idea of what they hope to achieve by/through the research, but they will not provide a convincing account of how they plan to go about completing their research, or what they will do should anything go wrong. Intermediate proposals may have a research plan, but there will be deficiencies in their risk mitigation/recovery strategy.

The proposal is intellectually coherent. Strong assignments will ‘add up’. Each step will logically flow out of the one that precedes it (i.e. the choice of literature logically drops out of the research problem; the data that needs to be collected, from the framework/models being used, etc.). Weak proposals will have none of this coherence. Intermediate proposals will have some of the expected coherence, but there may well be gaps in some of the thinking/contradictions in what they intend to do (e.g. the researcher identifies within the postmodernist tradition, but their approach for collecting/analysing their data is clearly positivist).