Much too late did I realize that the molding of a Ph.D. topic and the preparation of the proposal is something rather independent from the subject of study (software engineering, in my case) and can be taught and learned. The trigger for this insight was a writing course at the University of Leipzig where the instructor demonstrated with a few simple exercises that she had to offer something for the variety of subjects and fields the participants were working in.
This experience lead me to reflect on the whole process: what made it so erratic, why would it take longer than expected and why would it be so frustrating? I came up with the following explanations for myself:
unspecific guidance: everybody has heard of a “proposal” and you know that it is meant to be written before the actual thesis. But how to even get there? How to start, what to do in the middle? The time from start to proposal can easily cover a year and requires particular activities and techniques – find them out and name them
The deliverables are not clearly defined: so you look up some literature, how to structure it? What about these ominous research questions, how do they look like? What is a topic and when do I know that I have found one? At least for me it is very hard to try to reach an unclear goal.
Heuristics / strategies / quality gates: How to decide between alternatives? How to judge their feasibility? Again, if you have no clue what to look for, how do you know when you found it?
To find out more about this I went through a number of books and articles and for the most relevant sources I want to share what I consider most useful about them.
The sources
I have reviewed several books and online articles. Some focussing on academic writing project in general, some focussing on the early stages (up to a research) proposal for computer scientists.
The books
Booth, W. C.; Colomb, G. G. & Williams, J. M. (2003), The Craft of Research, The University of Chicago Press.
Davis, G. B. & Parker, C. A. (1997), Writing the doctoral dissertation: a systematic approach, Barrons’ Educational Series, Inc..
Kruse, O. (1999), Keine Angst vor dem leeren Blatt, Campus Verlag.
and the online articles
Lauer, H. (1975), ‘Discussion on Ph.D. thesis proposals in computing science’, The Computer Journal18(3).
Levine, J. S. (2004),’Writing and Presenting Your Thesis or Dissertation’, eBook, http://www.lulu.com/product/e-book-download/writing-and-presenting-your-thesis-or-dissertation-%28ebook%29/96916. (Also available at: http://www.learnerassociates.net/dissthes/index.htm)
The process of writing a proposal
All sources except Davis and Parker discuss the writing process at least up until the proposal itself. They all more or less assume that there are the following steps
an orientation phase
a literature research phase
a selection or refinement phase
the write-up of the proposal
Kruse describes the orientation in much detail, he discusses particular questions that any research should ask him/herself when starting a new, big project, how to narrow a subject down, what types of projects there are and much more. The book looks at all of this from a “writing” point of view, where the act and skill of writing is the vehicle to generate and order thoughts and bring them into a shape that can be used to inform others. Lauer takes the opposite approach and looks at the PhD process as a project and gives appropriate advice on how to manage the different stages.
The literature research phase is presented similarly in all the four sources. The literature review for a proposal is supposed to be comprehensive but not exhaustive (which it needs to be in the thesis itself). Kruse recommends to do a very superficial but broad literature “scan” in the orientation phase (including just reading headlines and abstracts), in order to get a feeling for topics and questions, the amount of potentially relevant material and an idea about who are names to remember in the field.
Deliverables and Gates
Even more important (at least for me) than information about the process were specific and concrete deliverables Ican work towards and “gates” at which I get feedback on how my creations are so far.
One of the most crucial self-assessment seems to be having a concise research question that reflects the current research. Only with a specific question can the available literature and the necessary research work be narrowed down sufficiently to actually get done. Booth, Colomb and Williams offering a short fill-in-the-blanks pattern for this purpose, that basically asks four questions:
What are you studying? (Topic)
What do you want to find out? (Question)
What for? (“Cost of Research”)
What benefit does it have for the reader? (Practical application)
A beginner’s mistake (count me in) is to stop narrowing down with just a topic. With an actual question, it becomes clear, what your interest in the topic is. This makes it more concise and relevant to you. Unfortunately, you are not researching for yourself, but for a community of researchers. The third part describes what value this research has to them, or conversely, what cost it comes with if it remains unanswered. Finally, especially if you are in applied research, the questions is: what are the implications outside the research community, in every day life.
Once one is a little deeper into any particular question, the “topic analysis” sheet from Davis and Parker might come in handy. They suggest to fill out a questionnaire with six questions, before starting to write the actual proposal. This questionnaire requires you to name a questions, but it also includes a short summary on related work, theories, research approach and possible outcomes. The idea is that you can fill out more than one questionnaire with reasonable effort. If you have more than one topic or several variants on one you can get into them deep enough to know what they are about and so decide which alternative is best, all before you write the actual proposal.
Lauer offers some advice on what should be in the proposal, which goes pretty much along the lines of Davis and Parker. His notion of checking the quality of a proposal leads to idea that this should be a circular or iterative process. He discusses what could go wrong at early versions of a proposal and what is necessary to fix these problems.
Summing it up
Hopefully, this little overview of my small library of research aproach sources has given you some hints as to whether or not this is usefull for you. I am sure there is a ton of different literature, but it appears to me that I am approaching “theoretical saturation“, the point at which reading new books on the same topic tell me almost nothing new. Yet there might be stuff that is better written, more compact or more specialized to one or the other discipline. I would love for you to share in the comments.
Bottom line: It’s not about starting something, it is about shipping. We are not lacking creativity, we have too much. When you have the discipline to finish what you started you watch out what you do start.
Love it, just because it put’s the my challange in such neat words.
I follow Seth Godin’s blog, but admittedly not very closely. He says a lot of smart things, but somehow the broad observations / interpretations of life, career and marketing don’t tend to stick with me. Today’s entry did, though. Says Seth:
When you compete with professionals, you have a problem, because generally speaking, they’re better at what they do than you are.
I think there are four valid ways the think your way out of this situation:
Hire a professional.
Be as good as a professional.
Realize that professional-quality work is not required or available and merely come close.
Do work that a professional wouldn’t dare do, and use this as an advantage.
The first option is expensive, the second one might not be reachable, the third one is neither here nore there. His point is that thinking about option four might really open up some new opportunities for you. Be an amateur but don’t try to hide it.
I see the point, but what got me more than arguing for one particular option is to see the whole list as a tool for categorizing different undertakings in life. Some examples:
PhD: Option 2 can be the only answer. You can’t do it half-heartedly, you can’t go for the “amateur” option and its unethical and risky to hire somebody that does the job for you.
Cleaning: With the exception of bathroom and kitchen, option 3 does it. No need to get all crazy about. When the dear mother announces a vist, option one might become interesting.
At many times in my job, acting out the fourth option really comes as an advantage. When we work with industry partners a lot of times they compare us favourably with industry consultants they come across. It is because of the lack of polish that goes along with “being the university”, and the unpretentious acknowledgement of where our areas of expertise are (and where not) that comes across as honest. Of course it still requires professionalism on the content level and of course, many consultants have substance and know their stuff.
… and then there are still those moments where you just cannot deliver at the highest level and still have to make it look official. And I guess, it is often a cultural thing. Not every client, say, during a sales pitch, would appreciate the honest amateurism. They would rather acknowledge that, “at least they tried hard and that’s why they should get some credit for it”.
So, I think I will go ahead and apply the heuristic to the tasks that will come up in the next time and use it as a test to see a) how serious I take the task (i.e. at what level I believe I can get away with it) and b) to determine how to act towards the other parties involved in a task.
I invite you to share with me, if you think this categorization makes sense and how you would sort your stuff into the different categories.
Over my two weeks of Christmas I got sick (nothing serious, just a cold), so I had ample time to read. Luckily, my brother lend me his copy of “The Back of a Napkin – Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures” by Dan Roam. Dan is the founder of Digital Roam, a consultancy spezialized on visualization of business problems. He holds a BA in Fine Arts and Biology and founded his company after a carrier in consulting. This book is his first. The basic message is: a) Visualize it (your problem) and you will yield more in the process of solving the problem and selling the resulting solution. b) Anybody can do it and all you need is a pen and a napkin (and not some fancy visualization software).
The Content
The message is hardly something new, but what really makes his book so valuable, in my eyes, is the toolkit he presents to get everyone started. Even those that claim not to be “visual thinkers” or to no be “artistic” enough to draw. Over the course of the book he introduces this framework with good explanation and many illustrated examples.
Problem Categorization
The first step in approaching any problem is to think about which type of problem it is. Dan uses the a simple, common-sense categorization of mostly “W”s and some “H”s: What / Who, How Much, Where, When, How and Why. For each of these problem category there is a appropriate type of visualization: Quantities (the “how much”s) are represented by charts, “where”s are depicted by maps (geographically or conceptually), “How”s are visualized through flow-charts and so on.
The SQUID
The problem categories give a idea about what data to acquire and process and a basic idea of how to visualize them. What is still missing, Dan argues, is a way to image the right aspects of the problem. For this purpose he develops the “SQVI∆” (read “squid”) framework. It takes you through the following process: For each problem at hand, ask yourself: Do I want to focus on:
S – Simple vs. Elaborate: Do I need to understand the basics or is the full picture with all details important
Q – Quality vs. Quantity: Is it sufficient to separate different “types” of things or do I need numbers and metrics?
V – Vision vs. Execution: Must I convince people of the vision, the goal we want to be at, or do they need to understand how to get there?
I – Individual vs. Comparison: Will the portrayal of our case be helpful or do I need to compare it with other cases?
∆ – As is or Change (“Delta”): Should I talk about the status quo or the change between now and then?
Based on your circumstances and the group of people you are interacting with, the answers are different, even for the same problem.
The Matrix
As you can see, the questions about what type your problem is and how to think about it are two more or less independent dimensions: you will have to think about both every time, the one does not follow out of the other. In the book, Dan combines these two and gets a matrix of 30 fields (6 types of problems times 5 Squid questions) , for each of which he suggest visualizations. So if you realize that you have to talk about a “when” problem you will end up with some sort of time line – this determines the “row” of the matrix. Then you look at the SQUID-questions and find out that you want to think about execution comparing the status quo of your company vs. anther company. The matrix suggest you, how to go about visualizing this: You can use two Gantt-charts next to each other, one for your company and one for the other, or maybe you can overlay the two charts, showing the differences.
Now, this example might appear to you like a complicated solution (running your finger through some table) to find a obvious solution (Gantt-Chart). Any maybe to a point this is true. I compare the use of “The Back of the Napkin” to the blessing of the “Getting Things Done” productivity approach by David Allen. David admits that all he presents is “advanced common sense” – collecting all your stuff, deciding what to do about it, separating between projects and contexts, reviewing your actions regularly, and so on. Nevertheless, his compact, structured description of the process, together with a well written introduction to getting the habit established makes it so much more likely to actually follow it.
The same is true for “The Back of the Napkin”: You will know most of the individual types visualizations, you know that problems can be separated into problems like “where”, “when”, etc. And yet:
The book gives you a structured and comprehensive framework to overlook the different alternatives and guides you through them. It makes a compelling case that anybody can draw the kind of pictures that are necessary for this kind of visual thinking. So even if you knew it all before, it is helpful to convince your team or your client that you should give visualization a try and that everybody can get involved in the process.
On a more practical, personal note, I find it unavoidable to revert to drawings anyway:
If you are like me, you can work much better, even when creating completely picture free end results (e.g. long texts), when mixing textual and visual information during preparation.
When you work together with others on a project you will end up drawing pictures anyway, because communicating ideas by saying “just read the memo” will not replcace the times standing in front of a whiteboard with other creating and explaining ideas
So, my recommendation is, that if you are a visual thinker, you work in teams or you present your ideas to other people, have a look at “The Back of the Napkin”.
Further Infos
For my German readers: Amazon Germany has the original version available. Apparently, a translated verison is also planned for May 2009.
Dan has a blog, in which he talks about his ideas and about how other make use of visual thinking. Look out for those entries in which he tackles a problem visually. HIs style of step-by-step visualization and textual thought development are really awesome examples of you to develop and present ideas.
There a two videos that I found.
One is Dan himself presenting parts of his ideas at a authors@google talk:
The other one is a short video presenting a summary of the book:
After a quick tour to the Königssee we started to drive up the A9 all to way to Leipzig. This Autobahn takes you over some hills, where the car really could show its bad gas mileage. It took us until the late afternoon to arrive in Leipzig. As I work in Leipzig, visiting here was a a non-brainer. Nothing much happened on that day so I might as well give you little bit of background about the town.
"Neues Rathaus" in Leipzig
When I say that this took us to the east it is more a historical than geographical information. The drive is almost straight northwards. Leipzig lies in what constituted East Germany (The German Democratic Republic – GDR) until 1990. On a map you will see that the five states on the ground of the former GDR cover the north-east quadrant of today’s Germany.
Leipzig is a very relevant city in German history. It was an important center of trade and culture hundreds of years before. The University of Leipzig is the second oldest in Germany (estimated 1409), trade was a major business since the late middle ages. Johann Sebastian Bach worked in Leipzig for many years and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe studied at the University.
Leipzig was an important place during the time of change (Wende) in 1989. During its traditional demonstration on mondays (“Montagsdemonstrationen) masses of people were voicing their disagreement with the political and economical situation. This increased pressure on the political system, but were not oppressed bloodily, unlike other riots before. This encouraged the formation of opposition movements. Today, almost two decades after the reunification, Leipzig is one of the few towns in East Germany that is prospering, while many other regions struggle with economic problems as a result of reunification.
On friday, the big roadtrip finally began. During our preparation, we decided to rent a car that would get us four adults comfortably through the country and carry a navigation system. So we consciously booked a upper class car, but still were surprised to get this:
A Volkswagen Touareg V6. Probably ideal to drive up the mountains we wanted to see, but hardly a car to drive comfortably on the Autobahn around them – the round trip offered my the chance to get over SUVs for good, and it worked.
The first trip in our newly rented monster truck took us to Munich, with a stop over in Rothenburg ob der Tauber. This town was known to me only because of the akwardsness of its name, even for German standards. But apparently it is quite the famous little German town – a must-see on any Japanese or North-American bus tour through Europe, it seems. The main attraction is its historic center that closely resembels a medivial German town, complete with a surrounding stone wall. Not surprisingly, the place was overrun with foreign tourists not knowing what to photograph first, but hardly any Germans beside the locals. There was a Weihnachtsmarkt so perfectly integrated into the scenery that one had to wonder if this was not built into the city permanently – as a permanent “Weihnachtsmarkt Show”. It even had a centralized return location for empty Glühwein cups, complete with opening times:
Just by chance I attracted a readership >0 on the topic of showing the parents-in-law (PIL) central europe. So “hi” to everybody. I am particularly sorry that I was not able to hold up the promise of “live blogging” during the trip – our schedule was too full to do that. The wifeattemptedto “futureblog” thewhole trip during our absence, so if you feel like it, you can compare the planed trip from the actual one.
To provide a complete overview of the travels I will also give a short update about the three days that my parents acted as tour guides instead of us:
Day 3 (December 1st)
"Altes Hafenamt" in Dortmund
Monday started with a quick tour of Dortmund. Downtown, the university, the football stadium… just to get a feel for the city. I would assume that they observed how the structure of a European town is different from the average American one: Different way of mixing commercial and housing zones, street layouts, styles of houses and such.
The main act, though, was definitely the birthday of my grandpa (for the remote chance that he will ever use a computer, let alone, browse the net: Happy Birthday!), he turned 79. The main attraction of this visit of course is, how my Opa and Oma represent the institution of (German) grandparentness. The whole package of having actually hand-made several cakes for just a handful of visitors, shoving it on your plate whether or not you like it, reciting stories about your relatives that you have heard about 500 times as if they just happened yesterday, and so on.
But, so I heard, everybody got along just great and loved it.
First days of the parents in law (PIL) in Germany. As expected, they are pretty overwhelmed by the fact that almost everything is at least slightly different than at home. This is what I enjoy most, when international visitors come by, to see the whole situation through their eyes and share the amazement of the exoticness of places that I usually hardly experience with full awareness. So instead of just giving a generic travel overview I will try to overlay their perspective with mine and talk about the perceived and real differences, large and small. Also, even at the first day I ran into situations where I could not answer the most basic and legit questions about stuff that just appears to everyday and familiar to really think about it – I guess the same display of not-knowing that would happen with a kid.
(Disclaimer: All this according to my observation and interpretation of the reactions of my PIL, also, they are to easy-going and polite to point out what they do not like or find questionable, repulsive, ugly, … In these cases I just have to guess).
This year in early december my parents in law will visit us in Germany for the first time. Everybody involved is looking forward to it and as it is their first time in Germany (and Europe) we will take them on a round trip through Germany. We will stay in Munich, Berchtesgaden, Leipzig, Berlin. In between we visit Rothenburg o.b.T., Neuschwanstein. Salzburg (ok, that is Austria) and Dresden.
On the days before and after the roundtrip, my parents and us take them on tours in and around Dortmund (Cologne, Münster, Düsseldorf, some “castles”, Aachen). By the time they are leaving they should be pretty fed up with “old stones” and the likes. Although some “can’t-miss” sites are on the list, we avoided to follow the travel advice for Americans on Nothing for Ungood.
This is a personal blog, currently without any grand scheme. My motivation is this: I want to take the opportunity and muse about things that remain on my mind and that need clarification – mostly for myself but offered to the public. As MerlinMannsays:
[...] to this day, almost everything I’m proud to have written on 43 Folders started as a letter to myself.
For the time being and a lack of a better place the blog will also be the platform to about noteworthy occurrences in my private life, allowing friends and family to get the occasional update. We will see if I will ever become productive enough as to justify (and motivate) a separation of blogs.
My current idea about topics is as follows
Observations and Opinions about Software: In the course of projects and research, as well as our humble IT-blog, I run into enough topics from different perspectives to believe that I have something to say about them that goes beyond just repeating the buzz.
Research Methodology in Software Engineering: While certainly a niche topic, the blog might turn out useful as a sandbox for ideas that one day might turn into my completed dissertation (or as an intermediate step conference and journal papers). Maybe it is just another playing field for procrastination, we will see.
Intercultural exchange, mostly US-EU: Being married to an American and and the resulting network of international friends gives me ample opportunity to watch cultures collide on various levels. While there are manygreatblogs on this already, I might find it appropriate to add my 2 cents to the the mix.
Random observations
Private stuff
This list and the whole blog can be most certainly considered work in progress.
