Research activities are part of your daily work as a project manager: Which copyrights have to be respected? What are current trends on the market etc.? In order to be as efficient and targeted as possible when searching for information, Dr. Tomas Bohinc in his tip a research strategy in four steps. He also gives you an overview of search engines and provides alternatives to Google and Co.
Management Summary
As a subscriber, you will receive the most important theses of the article summarized in the management summary.
Content
- Search for specific information
- The Internet as a source of information
- How valid is the information you have researched?
- Conclusion
- Literature
Topics
Research activities are part of your everyday work as a project manager: Which copyrights must be observed? What are the current trends on the market etc?.? To be as efficient and targeted as possible when searching for information, Dr. Tomas Bohinc in his tip a research strategy in four steps. In addition, it gives you an overview of search engines and provides alternatives to Google and Co.
Management Summary
As a subscriber, you will receive the most important theses of the article summarized in the management summary.
Content
- Search for specific information
- The Internet as a source of information
- How valid is the information you have researched??
- Conclusion
- Literature
As a project manager, research activities are part of your daily bread: While at the beginning of the project you z.B. Research lessons learned from other projects, patents, copyrights or market trends and industries, get expert information for software development, implementing organizational changes or construction projects while the project is ongoing.
Often this is when search engines like Google come into play. Google will provide you with good, usable information and a rough overview of the topic, but especially for special topics, the search results are not sufficient. In addition, you run the risk of taking "side paths" to lose and learn about things that have no or little importance in the current context.
In this tip I will show you how to search for information in a targeted way with the right search strategy and what other search options there are besides Google.
Search for specific information
A search is the targeted – not random – systematic search for information. So I recommend a strategy consisting of the following four steps:
1. Get clarity on the topic!
Let’s say you are given the task of organizing an advanced training program for the project managers in the company. To do this, you must first clarify the question of what exactly – that is, what information – you need to implement this task.
You need to z.B. inform about it,
- What qualifications there are in general for project managers,
- Which certifications the project managers of your company already have,
- Which certification system (PRINCE2®, IPMA, PMI®, etc.) is used?.) fits best to your company guidelines,
- whether you manage your projects mainly classically, agilely or hybrid; etc.
The more intensively you deal with the topic to be researched in advance and become clear about what exactly you need to look for, the more efficient the actual research will be later on.
2. Get an idea of the available sources!
Then get an overview of the available sources. Two mistakes often occur when researching:
- Focus on the information available in the company
This means that external sources are not taken into account, at least for an initial search. (If you z.B. research for a template for a specific topic only in-house, you may not find a template available on the Internet that is ideally suited for your topic.) - Neglecting research on the subject already carried out in the company
In this case, you invest a lot of time and energy in the search for information, although a colleague has already compiled it in another context.
Which sources do I use and when?
Often there is a multitude of sources available. Which of them you can use depends on the subject to be processed. If the issue is purely internal to the company, you research the company’s intranet, reports, protocols and interview experts in the company. If it is a new topic for the company or if you should make comparisons to other companies, you have to use external sources.
For the search on the Internet applies: If one receives too few pages with relevant information, change the search engine. There are search engines that specialize in certain topics. Since 1995, there have been so-called metasearch engines that forward the search query to other search engines and then process the results. (In the zip folder you will find a selection of search engines including their characteristics / special features in PDF format.)