Debrief of PhD project practices

The PhD project is by far the largest individual research, writing and software project that I have undertaken. This essay provides an information account of my project management experiences over the course of the project. This project debrief is presented as review of the practices that worked (Section II. ) practices that failed (Section III. ) and practices that will be considered if the project were to be repeated (Section IV. ). Finally the general principles and best practices are considered (Section V. ).The motivation for this work was to articulate and capture the general research project management lessons learned as a guide for future project design and work ethic. This is a personal account meaning that the applicability of the practices are relative to my experience and working style. Before the research project I was a trained software engineer with four years of practical work experience in industry. The research project was completed in the field of Computational Intelligence, a sub-field of Artificial Intelligence with strong themes of abstraction information processing and empirical simulation. The general work ethic involved an approximate 50-hour workweek and explicit separation of work from personal with regard to both physical location and activities undertaken [Introduction].