Part 1

1. 
   
   Constructing a rationale requires research, and research requires identifying unbiased sources of information. Clearly, you cannot rely on a company’s own marketing materials to be unbiased in its evaluation of its own products.Write a 150-word response about how you approached locating and vetting high-quality, unbiased sources of information when researching trends, vendors, and other easily hyped topics. How satisfied are you with your ability to identify unbiased recommendations for a specific project type? Why?
   

Part 2

Conducting research and creating a supporting research report serves two important purposes with respect to your project:

• It explains your technological choices in terms of business benefits and risks. This explanation is critical for executive approval.
• It either reinforces or improves your plan—but only if you apply the results of your research to a new draft of your plan. In the industry, project managers develop their plans iteratively by changing them as they conduct more research and identify better or cheaper alternatives. This iterative approach is especially relevant to IT projects because new technologies are being developed and retired at a very quick pace.

For this assignment, you will compile research and create a supporting research report. Then, based on your research, you will identify and explain the rationale for three improvements to the project plan you submitted last week.

Compile additional research on your project’s industry, recommended technology vendors, and the categories presented in the supporting research report. You may want to include the Gartner Group and Forrester Research in your list of organizations to research.

Complete the Supporting Research Report template.

Create a second draft of your project plan. Highlight in yellow at least three changes you made to the network, database, and/or cloud solutions within the second draft based on the in-depth research you conducted this week and explain why you made the changes.