DBA update

I received a letter from my supervisor about ten days ago which although encouraging about my work, pointed out that there is not enough of it. He suggested that the introduction be between 15-20 pages long, the literature review 60 pages, the literature synthesis about 10 pages and the methodology (including pilot study and findings) be between 25-30 pages long.

The introduction is currently sixteen pages long, so that's ok. The literature synthesis has to be reorganised, but I think that it eventually will be about 10 pages long. The methodology section doesn't bother me at the moment, although it will be hard to reach the suggested length. The real problem is with the literature review, which was about 15 pages long in the version which my supervisor had. I find it ironic that he is suggesting expanding this chapter, as the first version of the literature review for my first thesis was a staggering 91 pages - clearly too long! I was advised to slim it down to about 20 pages. There is no way that my current literature review will reach 60 pages - maybe this was a typo.

As it is the Passover holiday now, I have several days in which I can work on my thesis. In the days prior to the holiday, I spent some time looking for papers which I can include; yesterday and today I spent several hours writing up those papers. As a result, the literature review is now a shade over 20 pages long. Possibly I can make it longer, but I can't find anything more which was written about the subjects which the thesis is based upon, and I feel that including papers just for the sake of padding out the chapter is diluting of what I am trying to achieve.

Tomorrow I am going to work on the literature synthesis. At the moment, this is several pages long, but written without structure; I would add a paragraph whenever something occurred to me. Thinking about this today whilst walking the dog, I have decided to impose upon this chapter the same structure as the literature review (shown below): this will make it easier to understand and is also likely to make me think about new material.

Subjects in the literature review:

1. Flexibility of SMEs
2. Misfits
3. Enhancements
4. User resistance
5. Engineering and Organisational Change Management
6. Benefits
7. Inter-departmental cooperation

I used to save copies of my thesis and papers on the FTP server at work, which made it easy to transfer them between my various computers, but this seems to have disappeared again, taking all the files with it. So for the past few weeks, I've been using Google Drive as a transfer mechanism and also as a backup. At first it seemed that I could only access it from home, but later I discovered that I can access it without problem if I am already logged into my Gmail account.

[SO: 4747; 5, 23, 44

MPP: 1175; 1, 6, 7]