Graduate research is a complicated process, which many undergraduate students aspire to undertake. The complexity of the process can lead to failures for even the most brilliant students. Success at the graduate research level requires not only a high level of intellectual ability but also a high level of project management skills. Unfortunately, many graduate students have trouble planning and implementing their research. Project Management for Research: A Guide for Graduate Students reflects the needs of today's graduate students. All graduate students need mentoring and management guidance that has little to do with their actual classroom performance. Graduate students do a better job with their research programs if a self-paced guide is available to them. This book provides such a guide. It covers topics ranging from how to select an appropriate research problem to how to schedule and execute research tasks. The authors take a project management approach to planning and implementing graduate research in any discipline. They use a conversational tone to address the individual graduate student. This book helps graduate students and advisors answer most of the basic questions of conducting and presenting graduate research, thereby alleviating frustration on the part of both student and advisor. It presents specific guidelines and examples throughout the text along with more detailed examples in reader-friendly appendices at the end. By being more organized and prepared to handle basic research management functions, graduate students, along with their advisors, will have more time for actual intellectual mentoring and knowledge transfer, resulting in a more rewarding research experience.

Graduate research is a complicated process, which many undergraduate students aspire to undertake. The complexity of the process can lead to failures for even the most brilliant students. Success at the graduate research level requires not only a high level of intellectual ability but also a high level of project management skills. Unfortunately, many graduate students have trouble planning and implementing their research. Project Management for Research: A Guide for Graduate Students reflects the needs of today's graduate students. All graduate students need mentoring and management guidance that has little to do with their actual classroom performance. Graduate students do a better job with their research programs if a self-paced guide is available to them. This book provides such a guide. It covers topics ranging from how to select an appropriate research problem to how to schedule and execute research tasks. The authors take a project management approach to planning and implementing graduate research in any discipline. They use a conversational tone to address the individual graduate student. This book helps graduate students and advisors answer most of the basic questions of conducting and presenting graduate research, thereby alleviating frustration on the part of both student and advisor. It presents specific guidelines and examples throughout the text along with more detailed examples in reader-friendly appendices at the end. By being more organized and prepared to handle basic research management functions, graduate students, along with their advisors, will have more time for actual intellectual mentoring and knowledge transfer, resulting in a more rewarding research experience.

This research seeks to identify factors contributing to military and civil space system cost and schedule growth, quantify the relative impact of these factors, and establishing a set of models for predicting cost and schedule growth. The analysis consists of logistic and multiple regression to assess 21 Department of Defense and 71 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) space programs. The study finds that, for military spaces systems, communications missions, ground equipment, firm-fixed price contracts, and increased program manager tenure are all predictive of lower cost growth. For NASA space programs, the study finds that smaller programs (by total cost), more massive spacecraft, microgravity missions, and space physics missions are predictive of higher cost growth. For schedule growth of NASA programs, the study finds that larger programs and those developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Northrop Grumman, or international developers are predictive of increased schedule growth, whereas those programs developed by Johns Hopkins University are predictive of reduced schedule growth.