Beating the appraisal blues for good

The other day an email came around my department announcing the timetable for the annual review and appraisal process. Inwardly I groaned, and a knot started to form in my stomach.
This is a process which I have tried to engage in honestly and constructively for years, with disappointing results. Some managers treat it as a tick box exercise, others as a way of enforcing their authority or bargaining down requests for a pay rise or promotion.
Some do their best to make it valuable, but they're usually stymied by their manager's goals and the budgeting process. Regardless of whether I emerge from the final meeting with a good or mediocre rating, or even a healthy bonus, I can't think of one time when what I contributed actually made a real difference.
That's why reading that email gave me the creeping dread. Then, as I was a about to file the email away, my mood suddenly lifted and was replaced by a smugness bordering on joyful. Why? Because I'm a contractor, so none of that applies to me anymore.
I've only been contracting for a few months, but I love the sense of freedom and control over my future, as well as the improved financial rewards. It had its downsides: lack of security, jumping through bureaucratic hoops to set up a limited company, business bank accounts, VAT registration, payroll service, accounting, and so on, but I accept those. Even the lack of security is a feature of the honesty of your relationship with the client - you will be retained as long as your skills are sufficiently valuable. There it's no pretence of loyalty, nor is it demanded in return.
Coming back to the annual appraisal, I realised I don't need to fill in forms to plan my professional development, and I never have. All those development plans were there to make me more valuable to my employer, not more valuable to potential future employers, and certainly not more valuable to myself. I now plan my development for the job I want to do in five years time, not the job my manager wants me to do in six months.
And I'm happier that way.

Accountex 2013

I visited Accountex 2013 on Thursday at the Excel centre in London. This is a very quick post on my impressions, please don't take this as a comprehensive review.

The centre itself is a very pleasant environment, easy to get to from Waterloo via Jubilee line then DLR. It's very similar to the NEC in Birmingham, but probably better served for food outlets.

The show was professionally put together, with a good number of exhibitors. Partially as a result, it felt a little cramped - all the stalls very close to each other. Also, the "theatres" would have benefitted from being a bit bigger, as they frequently lacked sufficient seating and were very close to each other, so sound inevitably bled through.

As far as content goes, there wasn't a huge amount there for my interests. I found it heavily skewed towards accountants in practice; there were several companies performing document digitisation and management, and firms selling accounting packages aimed at the SME market (Sage, Xero and Intuit were there, but no sign of, for example, Oracle, SAP or IBM, or the many companies that support their finance systems). It was a similar story when it comes to tax and investment advice.

By contrast, there was very little for accountants like me who work in industry. That may explain why the CIMA-sponsored "Accountants in Business" theatre seemed to be standing-room-only for every session - aside from some of the keynote sessions it was the only venue that had talks I found relevant and interesting, and apparently I wasn't alone.

The most important thing at any conference - the freebies - was also a bit disappointing. Probably due to the current depressing state of the economy. I came away with a few biros, a book of accountant jokes, some mints and a lot of brochures, but not much else.

I don't want to sound too down on it, I think I'm just not the demographic they were targeting. If I was in practice, particularly if I ran my own small-but-growing practice, it probably would have been immensely valuable and interesting.

Will I go next year? Maybe, it depends what direction it develops in. Today I'm not sure why CIMA are involved as it's really not that relevant to their membership. However, accountants in business are a significant group, and the show is relatively young, so if they turn their attention in that direction I'm sure they will do it really well.

Workflows for small research projects

I never actually got round to writing the follow-up to those old blog posts, but I decided to republish them more or less verbatim as they're good background.

Software

As far as the software goes, Zotero very quickly won. I didn't get very far at all with JabRef. Maybe that's my lack of patience, but I think Zotero is actually a more complete tool for research. I suspect if you need to be able to output in LaTeX formats you might feel differently, but for me it was more important to be able to organise my academic sources quickly and easily.

I started off using the Firefox plugin version of Zotero, but as I prefer Chrome I now use the standalone version and a linking plugin. There are binaries available on the Zotero download page for Linux, Windows and OS X. If like me you use Ubuntu (or a variant like Linux Mint), I recommend installing using this method for simplicity's sake.

There's an Android client called Zandy that works, but could do with a bit more development. I'll come back to that.

I don't know if there's an iOS app. If you know of one, please leave a link in the comments.

Once you've installed Zotero, launched it, created an account, and recorded your username and password in the Zotero sync settings (your research library will be backed up automatically), you can start identifying your academic resources.

Workflow

For short essays I use Google Scholar almost exclusively. It doesn't have everything, but it has most academic papers and books you're likely to need.

I start off with the reading list and any references from my notes on the subject and use Google to find copies online. If you register your University's library in the Google Scholar settings you will be presented with direct links. As long as you're logged in to your University account you should be able to get free access to almost anything.

I use Zotero to grab the bibliographical links to the articles (there should be an icon on the right hand side of the address bar of your browser, click it and if necessary select the article you want to grab), and save them in a folder - I will usually have a folder named for the module I'm studying, then a sub-folder for that particular essay. You can also copy the PDF version of the article to the bibliographical record, which is a good way to keep track of your sources and build your own mini research library. Sometimes you can download the PDF directly to Zotero, and it will grab the bibliographical information automagically. I found this feature varied in effectiveness depending on the source website.

In addition to the bibligraphical information downloaded automatically, I like to add a few tags to highlight themes or keywords, to remind myself why I selected that article. These tags are searchable, so as you build up your library you'll be able to go back and look for old articles relevant to a new research project.

A word of caution: don't blindly trust that Zotero will grab the right information! Sometimes the data source isn't great, and you can end up with garbled data or a different article's information. Depending how you intend to use this, it's also worth checking if you've grabbed the abstract. If not, you can copy that in manually. It's worth putting in the time up-front to ensure the library you're building is effective, accurate and complete.

If you have a physical textbook you want to refer to (you know, the really expensive one written by the course Professor and only available in hardback, and yes, you have to buy the latest edition), I find Amazon is often a better source of bibliographical data.

Google Scholar's real strength is helping you find new sources that can add a new perspective and ultimately improve the quality of your research (and hopefully get you a better grade). Type in keywords related to your subject, and see what pops up. Look up the record for one of your existing sources, and follow the "cited by" link to see how other academics have used that article and what their viewpoint might add. Has someone from a different discipline adapted the ideas in an interesting way, and what can you learn from that.

For short essays, you should be careful not to spend too long doing this, for reasons regular users of Wikipedia will already be aware of.

On the subject of Wikipedia (a great place to start your research, a terrible place to finish it), Zotero can also record bibliographical data for individual webpages, including when it was accessed and grab a snapshot of that page. This is great for referring to newspaper articles and similar.

While doing your research, you can sync Zotero to any of your computers, or just access your library through the website. This makes it easy to carry on your reading wherever you are. On the move, Zandy allows you to access those PDFs you've saved to Zotero, which works pretty well on my Nexus 7 tablet. If I want to make notes I either take my netbook with me or print them out and annotate them by hand - I can transfer the most relevant notes to Zotero when I'm back at my desk.

In a short essay you will probably refer to every one of your relatively few sources directly. The easiest way to build your reference list is to select everything in your Zotero folder, then right-click and select "Create Bibliography from Items". Select the format you want to use (I use Harvard, per my University's guidelines) and the Output Method (I either use RTF or just copy to clipboard). Generally you will probably want to produce a bibliography rather than citations. You can then just paste the results at the end of your essay - this alone will probably save you an hour or so of laborious copying and typing.

Conclusion

I've really found Zotero to be incredibly useful of the last three years, and I've now started using it for the big Project and Dissertation at the end of my MBA course. There's a few significant changes to the workflow for a larger project like that which I'll go into in my next blog post.

Research Management Software

Originally published 28th September 2011:

As I mentioned in my last post, I've recently returned from the annual September Seminar at Warwick Business School. It finished with a half day workshop on the Project and Dissertation which was very helpful in that it gave me a much better idea of how to approach this daunting exercise.

Two things in particular became obvious to me - the first is that I will need to do a helluva lot of reading.
The second is I need to track what I read and keep it organised so I can make use of it to inform my decision making and reference it properly in the write-up.

As an illustration of this one of the speakers from the weekend, a WBS MBA graduate, told us how he has built a succesful consultancy business around having a well-indexed archive of relevant research as a direct result of his P&D, so this process should be rewarding in the long-run.

However, I'm a geek and therefore what sort of software to use for this is one of my first questions (I'll get onto hardware later). A quick plea for help on Twitter pointed me towards JabRef and Zotero.

Zotero was also one that was suggested by WBS, along with EndNote and ProCite. Fortunately, I have a Human Resources Management essay to write in the next month which I can use as a trial run. I'm going to try and evaluate both Zotero and JabRef - I don't think it's practical to try and use more than two, so sorry if you cheerlead for one of the others, and there are many!

I'm going to look at ease of use in the process of gathering and assimilating relevant literature, and then in how easily I can cite references in the text. As of today I have nothing so this is tabula rasa stuff.

I'll start by Googling for suggested workflows, reading the tutorials and actually trying to use these two systems. I'll be doing so on a variety of harware and platforms - desktop, laptop, netbook, Windows XP and Linux. I'll even try using my Android smartphone if I can!

Check back here in a few days for the results.

Internet Resources for Academic Research

Originally Published 30th September 2011

I chose to study my MBA by what Warwick call "Distance Learning". Thanks to the Open University we're all well familiar with the idea in the UK, but only those who've done it really understand the practice. Having spent nearly two years in the programme now I can honestly say I think it's a brilliant way to study. Don't get me wrong, going to University in my late-teens/early-twenties was an amazing experience - I learned a lot, about my course, myself, and other people. For me and millions of others it's a part of the growing-up process. A process I don't think I've quite finished yet!

Distance Learning is where your University send you study notes and a few important text books to cover the essentials of the course. You work through these in your spare time - in my case most of the actual reading was done on the train to and from work, but I've had at least one 'holiday' where I just sat and read for days. There are assignments to complete to gauge your progress - if you submit them you get a mark and feedback from a tutor, but they're not part of your final grade. I have to confess, due to lack of time I haven't done any of these yet. Of course, this is pretty limiting, especially for a postgraduate degree, so it's supplemented by face-to-face seminars and entire modules.

As this is a postgraduate degree we're also expected to read beyond the set texts and seek out the original books and articles that have influenced thought on the subjects we study. But how do you do this without access to a University Library? The answer, of course, is the internet. I have access to the full catalogue of the University of Warwick Library online. Through this I can get pdf versions of the vast majority of journals and articles I need. Books are a little trickier though - for practical and copyright reasons. I think the Library posts them out, but I've never used this service so can't comment on how it works.

This works really well when you have a good reference to look up, but not so well when you're trying to find an article your lecturer mentioned in passing, you're not sure how to spell the names, they garbled the title and you don't have a clue which journal it was published in. What about when you don't have any reference at all and you're trying to find something new? Well, we're all children of the information age now, so you probably saw this coming.

Google Scholar has indexed academic journals in electronic form that you can search in exactly the same way you search for a band's tour dates or a diagnosis for that embarrassing rash. They've even digitised millions of books - I'm not sure about the legality of that, but they're Google, so I guess it must be OK? If you tell Google Scholar which university you're at they'll provide links to the appropriate online library so you can download digital copies of articles. Otherwise they link to digital copies provided by other institutions, many of which let you view the abstract for free and download full text for a small fee. Finally, for full books there will often be a link to the digital version on Google Books.

The search results also give you links to the bibliographic references, essential for writing essays, and other articles which have cited the one in your results - useful for extending your reading and finding other articles which support or critique a theory.

So basically, everything you need is out there waiting for you. You're still going to have to put in the hours to read the material, and you still have to think critically and form your own opinions, but hopefully some of this will be helpful. This is the process that I'm starting now for my assessed Human Resources Management module essay. More about that in a future post.

Mission Statement:

I'm restarting this blog primarily to document some of the useful (and, no doubt, trivial) things I've learned while doing the Project and Dissertation for my MBA. I'll also be resurrecting some old posts from a previous blog that were related to earlier stages of the MBA.

I'm studying by Distance Learning at Warwick Business School and working full time. I also have a young family, and at times it's been very difficult to balance these commitments.
The main reason for this blog is that I've found there's a dearth of online advice about the practicalities of how to go about a research project. There are some good books available on the subject (I'd recommend Real World Research by Colin Robson), but they tend to be fairly generalised. 

I'm going to be very specific about what works for me, in particular some of the technology and workflows I use. That's the first caveat
I also want to cover some more personal aspects, how it's affected my life and career. 

I hope you enjoy reading this, please let me know what you think in the comments.