I've known this for a long time: walking the dog allows my mind to become unfettered, thus allowing new and surprising thoughts to enter my mind.
Today I was thinking (once more) about applying my enhancements model in my company. It occurred to me that one of the problems that we have with the salespeople is that they are paid a basic wage along with commission. It might well be that these people are loathe to participate in development meetings because they are not working on new projects while they are in meetings. This leads to the absurd that salespeople have to be compensated for their time if they participate! Everyone else is a salaried worker so they can participate in meetings all day long.
From there, I developed my thinking about the research phase for my doctorate: I realised that this has to be divided into four stages, namely
- Raw data collection - by means of semi-structured interviews, backed up with documents if they exist
- Data analysis - examining how close the practices used by the participating companies match the proposed model, paying close attention to the failed enhancement
- Discussing the model with the companies, showing how use of the model could have prevented the problems with the failed enhancements (this assumes that the model is 'correct'; it may get changed during stage 2)
- Revised raw data collection - seeing how successful were the enhancements developed by means of the model.
The methodology chapter as it currently stands only references the first stage. The 'why' of the above is derived from a quotation from one of the papers which I found the other day: The validity of a method can only be established by applicative success in practice.
As Israel is entering yet another long weekend (today is Friday and I go back to work on Tuesday), I have a few days which I can devote to writing about the four stages of the research phase.
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