Part I: Needs additional Research Objectives. Please see the attached yellow highlighted area and written in red as comment from professor.

Part II: Your Capstone Experience: Analysis and Retrospective

Your final assignment is to prepare a careful analysis of your entire capstone course experience. This analysis should be tightly drawn [i.e., not rambling], addressing each question [or set of related questions] below in fairly specific terms. Your analysis and retrospective will take a minimum of 5 but should not exceed 6 pages, double-spaced, to complete satisfactorily. In preparing this, use a few key words from each question as your “header” for responding to that particular question.

1 – Your research project started with your Capstone proposal. To what extent and in what ways did that proposal serve, effectively, as a “research plan” for your secondary research? What specific changes, if any, would you make in that proposal, now having completed your research? [Please begin your response with the “core purpose statement” [or question] that served as the overall focus of your project.]

2 – How would you evaluate the quality of your secondary research effort? For instance, were there areas that you believe you could have productively investigated further? Did you find a sufficient number of high quality and relevant references addressing each of your research objectives? And in actually drafting your “literature review”, do you believe you incorporated an appropriate level of analysis and perspective of your own – together with your presentation of findings from the literature?

3 – Looking at the various recommendations that you developed and presented in your final paper, to what extent do you feel that each of them is fully defensible, i.e., such that you would have no reluctance in appearing before a group of colleagues, or a group of fellow management/staff in your firm, a legislative committee, a hospital board of directors or etcetera . . .to defend those recommendations? [If you’re convinced your recommendations ‘hold water’, as we say, then one would hope you could go into such a meeting with a high level of confidence!!] If there are one or two recommendations, for instance, where you don’t believe you have “quite” the level of research support that you’d like to have [based on your secondary and/or primary research], explain why.

4 – What were the two most difficult aspects [and/or sections] of the paper to develop and write, and why? [Exclude the Abstract, Reference section and Appendices (if any) from your discussion.] What section or sections did you find comparatively easy to write?

5 – As you might guess, the material I included in the Capstone Project Resource Folder and in the guideline document titled: The Capstone Project: Converting Your Research Work into a Written Product, were intended to assist with the ‘presentational’ aspects of your research project, i.e., the crafting of a high quality, professional research paper. What one, or two ‘resources’ did you find particularly useful, and why? Also, what sort of guidelines, tips, or other ‘assists’ would you like to have had but which were not available either online or via my occasional emails? [Please don’t respond with something like “I can’t think of anything here . . there were sufficient resources for every aspect of the project”.] Be creative and thoughtful in composing a response here, keeping in mind that there are always ways of improving something!

6 – To what extent did you find yourself adequately prepared for the “technical” construction of your paper – in terms of following all the assorted “APA” rules/guidelines? If you were insufficiently prepared, how might this have been remedied, either on your own part or via a stronger/clearer emphasis on this by professors throughout your MBA program?

7 – Thinking of the sum-total of knowledge you gained based on all your research, what one or two ‘findings’ [results] came out of your research that surprised you? [Note: If “nothing” surprised you, one might wonder why you believed – at the outset – that this was a very important topic to “research”!] And, why do you think these findings/results were surprising?

8 – Your Capstone experience consisted essentially of two kinds of learning: (1) gaining a better, clearer, more in-depth understanding of what the process of doing research is all about and, (2) learning how to ‘construct’ a solid, presentable, reader-oriented, professional research paper. In other words, your experience related to both process and presentation. Okay . . . . with that as context, what did you gain from your capstone experience in regard to each of these two dimensions?