Proposal Timetable and Resources
One line of specification and complete freedom of form. What the source does not leave free is the constraint underneath the whole plan, which it names outright — and one task on the chart that you do not control the duration of.
What the component specifies, and what it leaves to you
For a project manager this is the least demanding component in the table and the one most likely to be produced in ten minutes from a template. That is exactly why it is worth slowing down on: the thing being scheduled has properties most delivery schedules do not.
SPECIFIED AGAINST UNSPECIFIED
| The source specifies | The source leaves entirely open |
|---|---|
| That tasks are depicted | What counts as a task, and at what granularity |
| That stages or times for completion are shown | Whether you show stages, times or both, and against what calendar |
| That any visual form is acceptable — chart, timeline, flowchart or other | Which form suits which kind of study |
| That the component may sit inside the research design section instead of standing alone | How you decide which placement to use |
| In the shorter outline, that resources are stated | What "(special)" qualifies, and what an ordinary resource is by contrast |
Column one reproduces the supplied source. Column two lists what it does not address.
The freedom of form is genuine, and it is worth using rather than defaulting. A bar chart against dates is right when the work is sequential and the dates are real. A flowchart is better when the sequence has decision points — and a research plan with an ethics gate in it has at least one. The rest of the component table is at Components of a Research Proposal.
Time is named as the biggest constraint
The source ranks the constraints and puts time first. It does not rank them as a general truth about research; it says this about the proposal you are developing, which is a document with a submission date attached to a study with a submission date behind it.
That has a design consequence, not just a scheduling one. When time binds, scope is the only variable that adjusts — you cannot buy weeks, and adding effort to a single-researcher study adds little. Scope as an instrument is at Scope and Delimitation, and the do-ability assessment at Assessing Research Topic Feasibility.
The task on the chart you do not control
The ethics material in the same dataset supplies a rule that reshapes the schedule entirely: "You cannot proceed with your research project if you do not have approval from relevant ethics committees. And even if you have gathered data before you have ethics clearance, you are not able to use it for your findings!"
Read as a scheduling statement, that is a hard finish-to-start dependency with no fast-track and no partial credit. Work done early is not banked — it is unusable.
- Design settled
- Instruments drafted
- Supervisor review
- Committee submission
- Amendment rounds
- Approval
- Collection begins
That chain is assembled from what the ethics material describes rather than quoted from it, and two of its links are commonly missed. Instruments have to exist before submission, because the committee wants to see the interview questions, survey instruments and participant explanatory statement — the same documents the proposal's appendices component asks for. And student applications route to the supervisor for review and authorisation before they reach the committee, which is a queue you do not control either.
A further dependency applies where the study sits in a workplace. The material states that research hosted by your workplace or a related organisation becomes part of that organisation's business ethics and needs clearance from there as well, that each organisation has different processes, and that you should check the form, the route and "the timelines that apply". Two approvals, two queues, two sets of dates — see Ethics Review and Approval Processes.
Resources and access
The material's phrasing is careful: resources and access to the necessary people and data "may be an issue in most proposals". Most. It is treating access as the normal difficulty rather than the exceptional one.
The material does supply a usable set of access questions, in the part that deals with refining a topic. They read as feasibility questions but they function as a resource inventory.
The access questions the source poses
- Where would you conduct the research?
- Do you have access to a site, or an organisation where or with whom you could conduct research?
- What kinds of data would you look for to produce some new knowledge in this field?
- Where is that data — is it in records and reports?
- Or is it in the testimony of people, which you might gather through interviews or focus groups?
- Do you have access?
- How would you go about gathering the data, and why in that manner?
"Do you have access?" is asked twice in that sequence, which is the source's own emphasis and not an editing error. It is the question a proposal most often answers optimistically, because at proposal stage the answer is usually a conversation rather than an arrangement.
Turning an assumed access into a stated one
Do-able, practicable, implementable
Three words appear in this material and they are not synonyms. Do-able is about resources — whether the work can be performed at all. Practicable is about circumstances — whether it can be performed here, by you, now. Implementable is about the design — whether the plan can be executed as written.
The material supplies three questions for fixing the boundary that makes all three true, and each is a scheduling input as much as a scope input.
Three questions the source tells you to ask
What is the standard for the research?
The rigour expected sets the depth of every task on the chart. A study held to a higher standard is not the same study done more carefully — it is more instruments, more participants, more analysis, more time.
What is the word count allocated to the work?
The most underrated planning constraint in the list. Word count caps how much can be reported, which caps how much is worth collecting. A collection plan that produces more data than the document can carry has scheduled work whose output will be discarded.
Are you restricted in the kind of research you can undertake?
Restrictions come from your degree requirements, the supervisor, the host organisation and the ethics process. Each removes options, and removing them early makes a plan credible rather than aspirational.
Building the chart
A sequence that produces a defensible plan
Take the tasks from the design section, not from a template
Every task on the chart should correspond to something the research design section commits you to: a participant group to recruit, an instrument to administer, a body of data to analyse. A task with no counterpart in the design is decoration; a design commitment with no task is unscheduled work. The design section is covered at The Research Design Section.
Place the dates you do not control first
Submission date, semester or reporting boundaries, and any organisational cycle you have to collect around. These are fixed points; everything else is arranged between them.
Insert the approval gate as a milestone
Not a duration. Everything involving participants or their data hangs off it. Where the study is workplace-hosted, there are two gates, and the material warns that the timelines differ between organisations.
Break collection into its real components
Recruitment, scheduling, the collection event, follow-up and chasing non-responders. Collection shown as a single bar is the commonest reason a plan looks achievable and is not.
Schedule analysis against the volume you will actually have
Transcription and coding scale with the amount collected, not with the number of participants. If the word count will not let you report it, do not schedule collecting it.
Add the tail that outlives the submission
The ethics material states that research data must be stored securely for a minimum of five years to comply with a named national code, and a minimum of seven where a state government department is involved. Those are stated in the source as requirements flowing from that code, not as illustrations — and they mean the last task on your plan falls years after the document is marked. Storage and ownership are covered at Research Data Storage, Retention and Ownership.
Show the slack, or admit there is none
A plan with no float is a claim that nothing will go wrong. A reader who has supervised research knows better, and a plan that names its own float is read as more credible, not less.
Where timetables quietly fail
The failure is rarely that the plan was wrong. It is that the plan was never load-bearing — it was produced to fill a component and never used to test the study.
Final pass on the plan
- Every task traces to a commitment in the research design section
- Every collection task sits behind an approval milestone rather than a date
- Where the study is workplace-hosted, both approvals appear and their timelines are treated separately
- Recruitment is a distinct task from collection, and chasing is distinct from recruitment
- Access to every site, group and dataset is named, with the person or arrangement it depends on
- Any tool, licence, service or venue with a lead time or cost is on the chart
- The data scheduled for collection can be reported inside the allocated word count
- Retention runs past submission and appears somewhere on the plan
- The plan has float, and the float is visible
- You know which task you would cut first if the plan slipped — and cutting it breaks no research question
What to carry forward
- The specification is one line and the form is free. Choose the form deliberately — a research plan with an approval gate is closer to a flowchart than a bar chart.
- The source ranks time as the biggest constraint. When time binds, scope is the only variable that moves.
- Ethics approval is a finish-to-start predecessor. Data gathered before clearance cannot be used in your findings, so early work is not banked work.
- Show approval as a milestone, never as a duration you invented, and show what you will do while you wait.
- The one quantified case in the material — five rounds over more than five months — is a single insider study on a dependent group. It is a warning, not a planning figure.
- Access is the normal difficulty, not the exceptional one, and the source asks "Do you have access?" twice. Name what your access depends on.
- Resources appear in only one of the two component lists, and "(special)" is never defined. Establish them anyway.
- The last task on a research plan is data retention, and it falls years after the document is submitted.
Frequently asked questions
What form should the timetable take?
The source says it "may take the form of a chart, timeline or flowchart (or any other)" and specifies nothing further. Choose by the shape of the work: a bar chart against dates when the sequence is linear and the dates are real, a flowchart when the plan turns on decision points such as an ethics outcome, and a stage-based timeline when the calendar is uncertain but the order is not.
How long should I allow for ethics approval?
The supplied material gives no typical duration. The only quantified figure anywhere in it describes one case study — five rounds of amendment over more than five months — for insider research on a dependent group, which is the hardest category of application. Treat approval as a milestone your collection tasks depend on rather than a bar with a duration you chose, and ask your own committee about current timelines.
Do I have to include resources, or just a timetable?
It depends which list you follow. The thirteen-row component table asks only for tasks and stages or times. The shorter nine-element outline in the same material asks for "Time-frame and (special) resources" as one element. The material never reconciles the two, and never defines what "(special)" excludes — but since it also says the research must be practicable and implementable, establishing resources and access is worth doing whether or not you write a section about it.
Can I start collecting data while my ethics application is under review?
No. The material is emphatic: you cannot proceed without approval from the relevant committees, and even if you have gathered data before clearance you are not able to use it for your findings. That makes pre-approval collection worse than useless — it consumes participant goodwill and produces data you must discard.
My study is hosted by my employer. How does that change the plan?
It adds a second approval. The material states that where your research is hosted by your workplace or a related organisation it becomes part of that organisation's business ethics and you will need clearance from there as well as from the university, that each organisation has different processes, and that you should check the form, the route and the timelines that apply. Two queues, and they do not run in parallel by default.
Where does the timetable go in the proposal?
Either as its own component or inside the research design section — the component table explicitly allows both, listing the item as "Timetable / plan (may be part of research design)". Putting it inside the design section suits studies where the plan is short and closely tied to the method; standing it alone suits studies where access, approvals and organisational cycles make the schedule an argument in its own right.
References and source attribution
- Naoum, S. G. 2013, Dissertation Research & Writing for Construction Students, 3rd ed., Routledge — cited in the supplied source, including its material on planning and setting out a research project.
- O'Leary, Z. 2017, The Essential Guide to Doing Your Research Project, 3rd ed., Sage Publications, London — cited in the supplied source among the general research methods texts behind its treatment of feasibility.
- Quinlan, C. 2011, Business Research Methods, 1st ed., Cengage Publishing — cited in the supplied source, including chapter 3 as the ethics reading for the week that supplies the approval material.
- Cooper, D. & Schindler, P. 2008, Business Research Methods, 10th ed., McGraw-Hill — cited in the supplied source as the origin of its definition of ethics and its treatment of ethical issues by research stage.
- The supplied teaching source: consolidated weekly teaching notes and slide material on developing a research proposal and on research ethics, including the component table attributed there to a university education faculty's study resources, the nine-element outline attributed to a university student learning centre, and three ethics case studies stated by the source to be based on fact with fictitious names.
Suggested questions for Ask KEVOS
- Turn my research design section into a task list for the proposal timetable.
- My plan shows data collection as one bar. Break it into the tasks it actually contains.
- Rehearse my schedule with the ethics milestone slipping — what breaks first?
- List everything my study's access depends on and who controls each one.
- Which task would I cut first if the plan slipped, and does cutting it break a research question?
- Draft the paragraph that explains what I will do while the ethics application is under review.