I acknowledge

The journey to achieve a PhD is a marathon. Decades ago, I set myself this target and many people have helped me on the long way with practical and emotional encouragement.

The most recent support came from my two supervisors. They encouraged, berated and trained me through exciting and intellectual conversations. I enjoyed their realistic, enthusiastic support and their complementary approaches so that my research developed in ways I’d never have guessed.

I thank our erst-while director of research students for accepting my original naïve proposal for the Masters in Research Methods and then allowing me to continue onto the doctorate. What faith the man has! I thank our erst-while project assistant Shelagh for her practical help. I thank my fellow OUBS students for our coffee-time seminars where discussion has ranged from soccer to supervision, from cricket to critical realism. They’ve helped me get alternative angles on progress and research. I thank also Minh, LizT and other unseen commentators on this PhD blog for their electronic encouragement.

A big thank you goes to my anonymous participants for providing that all-important access to their organisations, for giving me their time to provide insights to their experiences of IT projects.

I set aside my domestic duties (not so sadly) to complete this research, so I thank Cherry for cleaning round me while I typed, my lovely husband for doing all the cooking and shopping the last few months, my brothers, my brother-in-law, and my son for reading and feeding back on earlier drafts of this thesis. I thank my late husband too – we used to talk about IT project management and the public sector client. To him I owe the original idea for the research.

Later, after the viva, you can borrow my thesis from the OUBS or OU library, or download from the ORO - assuming I pass.

Social Networking pays off

I have wonderful Facebook friends. Four years, a young fellow post-grad encouraged me to join Facebook, which I'd thought was for my children. Since then, I’ve been idling away my time on Facebook, seeing it as a transitional activity between useful academic and productive research work - an alternative to playing cards. Now it pays off.

A few months ago I broke my hand, and typing one handed on Facebook, I bemoaned the delay to my thesis whereupon several friends offered help. Last week I took up the offer from three of them, also post-graduate students – though in other places – to read my cross-case analysis, a chapter that I started writing last April, and have struggled with. Even my knitting was never as entangled and useless as this chapter has been – supervisors have read versions of it again and again until they can’t read it any more. My three Facebook friends agreed to read it against the brief:

• does it flow?
• has it said something sensible about each of the four research questions (with a comment on supervisors’ different perspectives)
• any typos, grammar problems or missing words

My friends have responded very helpfully and encouragingly with comments mainly about where they got confused, but also where I’ve said something interesting that I could pull out more and how to do that. They've also picked out 'an' when I meant 'and' and 'temporarily when I mean 'temporally', so done some proof-reading too.

This has really encouraged me, not only that I’m writing so someone else understands, and that my research has interest but also that I now have a justification for using Facebook. Social networking isn’t idling away time but an important activity!