ABSTRACT
The duration of the master's/honours (M/H) project is rarely a full year, but is usually the equivalent of 8–9 months' full-time study, to allow time for the thesis to be examined, often externally, and for results to be finalized before the end of the academic year. This chapter suggests that within the tight timeframe of the M/H year, supervisors can take a staged approach to the type of feedback they offer. It aims to foster independence in the emerging researcher, the M/H candidate. The M/H project is more than just a step up in scale from undergraduate study. The term 'project management' is often associated with long-term, big-budget, multi-party manufacturing projects. Nevertheless, the stages through which large-scale projects pass can be used to structure the management and supervision of small research projects. The chapter maps typical project phases onto an M/H project: planning; implementation and monitoring; and completion and evaluation.
