April 5, 2016February 9, 2017 by moocsumo

Topic 6: Begin Your Case Study

“Overview … Readings and Lectures”

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Summaries

Topic 6: Begin Your Case Study > Readings and Lectures > Getting Started Video
Topic 6: Begin Your Case Study > Readings and Lectures > Parting Words Video

Topic 6: Begin Your Case Study > Readings and Lectures > Getting Started Video

What are your next steps-you, as the researcher or writer? First, our suggestion is that you sit down and you plan ahead. It takes a lot of time to write a good case.
It takes collaboration and any time you have collaboration and you have to get lots of different people in the room or have conversations with them, that takes time.
A good case takes probably 340 hours-total- of different people’s time, and about 260 hours of your time, over at least 9 weeks.
A tip from us: It’s very hard to stop and start a case study.
You probably will have the same in your organization or if you’re a PhD student writing a case study as part of a dissertation, the meeting will be with your prospectus committee.
This will help you when you’re in the field and you’re trying to remember what it is that was the focal point of this case study.
At Innovations for Successful Societies, we have a special timing for our case studies.
Because we’re doing them in sequence, one case is phasing out while the other begins.
So there is a period that is part- time work for ten days in which we dig in and do the background research.
The author’s other case study, the previous one, is probably ending at that time.
We then go into the field and, in most cases, we’ll do ten intensive days of interviewing, with multiple interviews during the day.
It’s generally ten concentrated days of interviewing.
An author has ten days for the first draft, which the directors read, then two days to edit or respond before a group conversation about the draft.
So at these final stages, the next case study is starting.
It has generated about 24, 25 cases a year, with 4 to 5 researchers.
It takes about 340 hours of time, again, for each case.
Now, I’ve just given you my proposed schedule for completing a science of delivery case.
Oliver Haas is now going to introduce the process proposed by the Global Delivery Initiative, a multi-donor effort to try to create a library of science of delivery cases.
We look forward very much to reading your first case study.

Topic 6: Begin Your Case Study > Readings and Lectures > Parting Words Video

These guidelines are the methodological foundation or the backbone of all case study writing and science of delivery.
They are fairly relaxed framework and should help guide you through the case writing process, which means you will find information on science of delivery in general, you’ll find the different phases of case writing, and you will see a lot of hands-on material that simply should help you writing cases.
Okay, so let’s talk about the different phases of case writing.
In phase one, what usually happens is that a commissioning party, for example a colleague from a technical department, gets together with someone who knows about the science of delivery and shows interest in case writing.
The next step will be to identify the case writer who will actually write the case.
There’s a technical expert, who has the technical knowledge about the case study, there’s a science of delivery person who knows about the science of delivery and what it’s all about, and there’s you, the case writer, the methodical expert.
Now the next step after you have defined the scope and the basic idea of the case study is for you, the case writer, to write a preliminary outline that includes a lot of different questions, but also most likely a reflection of documents that already exist.
The last phase is to actually finalize the case study and make it ready for dissimulation.
Before you do that, we often recommend having little clinics where you get together with technical experts who provide you with valuable feedback on the case study.
In the end, your case study will be submitted for clearance and then will go for a final editing to external communications before it will be uploaded onto the Global Delivery library.
They simply should help you familiarize yourself with case writing.
In the end what matters is case studies that are structured, readable, and exciting, I think this is what we are looking for when we talk about case studies.
So let me finish with a few things that we have realized over time that might even help you as a case writer.
One thing is, keep in mind that you as the case writer do not have to become the technical expert.
He or she makes sure the case study is well crafted.
The ownership for the case study is not only with you, but also with the technical expert.
Secondly, we often realize that case studies become very, very large documents-40, 50 pages.
You want to surprise the reader with interesting insights into how implementation works, because this is the reason that we do science of delivery case studies.