The High Impact Project provides an opportunity for you to apply your discipline-specific skills practically. The project will test your ability to investigate a problem in industry and draw from what you’ve learned (are learning) in the Master of Management to propose a potential solution(s) to a specific company.

Think of the project as a consulting assignment that requires 260-300 hours of work. A successful project must adhere to these stipulations:

• The project must address a current problem for a real organisation. It cannot be a hypothetical or desktop research study.
• The problem you’ve identified must relate to the discipline you are specialising in (i.e. it must be either a marketing or supply chain related problem).
• Your investigation of the problem as well as your development of potential solutions must be substantiated through data collection and analysis. Data collection may include surveys, interviews, analysis of company records, time studies etc. All proposed data collection is subject to ethical clearance.
• The final report must be of practical value to the leadership of the company.
• The final report should be of a professional calibre - something that can be handed to the CEO of the organisation as is.

The greatest difference between this project and other papers in the Master of Management is that it is an individual endeavour and your learning is self-directed. A greater degree of self-discipline is required. The assessments in this paper are designed to keep your project on track for timely completion and to make sure that you are paying attention to the right things. You will also have regular meetings with your supervisor to discuss your progress. Your supervisor is a sounding board, a guide, and a quality controller - not a project manager. Therefore, you need to be creative in finding answers and proactive in getting things done.

A note about finding projects: Dannie Jefferies will work with the Work-Integrated Learning (WIL) office and WMS' Industry Engagement office to identify potential projects for this paper. It is not required that students find their own industry projects. However, if students have industry projects that they would prefer to work on, they should email dannie.jefferies@waikato.ac.nz before the start of the paper to discuss this.

Taught sessions
Taught sessions and workshops focus on the business research skills you'll need for this project. Some sessions have a FLEXI option and others will be fully online. Although all sessions will be recorded, they are synchronous. That means that you are expected to be present online for the session and to participate in class discussions and activities. These sessions require pre-work (reading and/or watching videos) that is important if you want to get the most out of the session. Please refer to Moodle for the taught session and workshop schedule.

Workshops / feedback / progress meetings

Most of this paper's work is self-directed. To help you stay on track, there will be frequent meetings with your supervisor. If you require more input than the scheduled meetings provide, you can schedule additional individual consultations during your supervisor's office hours. Please refer to Moodle for the meeting schedule. All meetings are fully online.