Abstract
This document gives some ideas about how to write a project proposal, and provides a template for a proposal. You should discuss your proposal with your advisor.
Your proposal should be about 4 pages long.
Your project proposal should cover the following points:
• the problem that you are going to solve;
• how you plan to solve your problem;
• how you intend to evaluate your solution; and
• any resource requirements for your project such as software, hardware or other resources that will be needed in the course of the project.
Particularly, your proposal should follow this format STRICTLY!
IMPORTANT NOTE: your project must involve one of the following:
• Research (using conference and journal publications), producing a publishable paper by you. You must develop simulation code to support and validate your claims and conclusions
• Code development: You must develop original code to implement the project – no third party code is allowed unless clearly indicated – and majority of the code should be yours.
• Other engineering implementation project as approved by your advisor
Proposals involving learning a software package, evaluating a product etc. are unacceptable and will be rejected.
Also please note that
IMPORTANT NOTE: your project must involve one of the following:
• Research (using conference and journal publications), producing a publishable paper by you. You must develop simulation code to support and validate your claims and conclusions
• Code development: You must develop original code to implement the project – no third party code is allowed unless clearly indicated – and majority of the code should be yours.
• Other engineering implementation project as approved by your advisor
Proposals involving learning a software package, evaluating a product etc. are unacceptable and will be rejected.
Also please note that
The Problem
In this section you should give a brief description of the problem itself. You want to briefly explain the problem, why it is important to solve the problem and define your project aims. After reading this section, the reader should understand why it is a problem, believe that it is important to solve and have a clear idea of the aims of your project.
When describing the aims of the project, you should avoid vague, unmeasurable words like ‘analyse’, ‘investigate’, ‘describe’, and use specific, measurable words like ‘implement’, ‘demonstrate’, ‘show’, ‘prove’. For example:
Good: The aim of this project is to implement and evaluate a management system for network switches;
is much better than:
Bad: The aim of this project is to investigate management systems for network switches.
In the second case there is no idea of how much work is involved, and you will never
know whether you have finished. You and your supervisor (and the markers of your project) may have very different ideas about what such an ‘investigation’ involves. Of course, it is possible that the task you set yourself is not achievable, but if you are clear from the outset this is less likely, and will more easily be corrected.
Why This Project?
Describe the importance of this problem and why it justifies doing a masters level project on it. Also you must do some preliminary research and state whether a solution to this problem has been attempted by anyone in the past or you are the first one proposing an original solution.
Proposed Solution
In this section you will explain how solve the problem, that is, how you intend to carry the project out. At this early stage you need to be both clear about what you are going to do and flexible enough to adapt to changing circumstances. Making an early plan will not prevent you from running into trouble, but it will help you identify possible problems early. Be specific about your development tools, that is what programming language, what development tools, operating systems, etc. You also have to be very specific as to what the final deliverable will be. As an example, you should say, “the final project deliverable will be an Android based app that receives data from XYZ sensors attached to the smart phone to display and transmit the processed data to central database implemented in Java.”
Proposed Timeline
An integral component of the course is project management. This includes the planning process involves producing a timetable for when the work is actually going to be done.
Each part of the project should produce some output. For example you might plan on
spending two weeks on background reading: the output of this will be a bibliography, and a possibly a literature survey for your report. Indeed, if you take the advice given above about having specific, measurable goals, you should describe this part of your project as:
Good: Produce bibliography (est: 2 weeks)
rather than:
Bad: Background reading (est: 2 weeks)
You MUST include a timetable as follows with your proposal: (please note that the content I have put are intended to be an example – you must fill the table yourselves)
Week
Activity
Deliverable
Comments
1
Research for Project Topic
None
2
Submit Proposal
Formal Proposal
Once proposal is approved, activities can begin
3,4
Start user interface development
User interface specifications
5,6
UI Coding
UI source code
7
Debug UI code
