Work continues to provide smash my time. I managed to read through two of the four articles this week which I had identified the previous week. One of the articles was pretty poor and so I’ve removed it from my pool. The other article, “A Multi-Vocal Review of Security Orchestration”, proved excellent, but unfortunately gave me more to think about. During my review I constantly needed to pull myself back from the rabbit holes I kept falling down. It has however helped me identify a number of other articles which I’ve put on my list to look at in the hope of completing my hand.

This week at work has been horrendous so I’m unfortunately only making a single entry this week. As I noted in my last post, I had to start down the track of breaking the research into building blocks for the final outcome as opposed to looking at the topic as a whole. I’ve managed to come up with my building blocks being ‘Shared Services’, ‘Cloud Technologies’, ‘Cloud Services’, ‘Multifaceted Security Orchestration’. Obviously these are my initial keywords but variations of these will be used as I progress through the research. I’ve discovered four articles so far which may fit the bill, but have as yet only read through the abstracts for these and not completed a more thorough analysis per the steps I outlined in my proposal.

I’ve today started work on searching for my articles. There is a dearth of available information on the topic, which I anticipated and hence catered for in my plan. It’s now a matter of breaking the work down into building blocks and researching each of those with the view to stitching the research together at the end.

I’ve made really good progress and have now completed the first draft. I haven’t updated the WBS with the swap of the WBS work with the other documentation work as I had issues with dependencies

In developing the proposal I decided to review some literature on how to undertake literature reviews. There’s so much more to it than what is normally given credit. I’m taking on the approach provided by Fred Pyrczak’s book, Evaluating research in academic journals: a practical guide to realistic evaluation which I feel works well with the outcome I’m attempting to achieve.

I’ve broken down my document pretty much in line with the template provided in the Subject Outline, which is:

1. Title
2. Rationale
   1. Problem Domain
   2. Purpose and Justification
3. Supervisor Approval
4. Research Challenges / Questions
5. Conceptual or Theoretical Framework
6. Methodology
   1. Analysis of sources of information
   2. Research Method
   3. Data collection method
   4. Ethical Issues
   5. Compliance Requirements
7. Project Plan
   1. Duration
   2. Deliverables
   3. Work Breakdown Structure
   4. Gantt Chart
   5. Risk Analysis
8. References

Today I started the project proposal. My project plan had me starting the template for this on the 26th, but given it was so minimal I’m not too worried, particularly because I’ve realised in my project plan that I’d put the WBS & Gantt development after development of the document. Either way I’m on track to finalising everything I need for the assessment.