BUS9040M: Decision Analysis for Managers Assignment 5: Group Decision-making using the DELPHI method Note: Please do make sure that you appropriately cite any reference material, using Harvard Referencing style and ensure that you draw from quality academic sources. On this note, remember that general internet sources such as Wikipedia and Investopedia are not recognised academic sources. [Number of words guide: approximately 700 900 words] As discussed, DELPHI is a widely used research method for deriving consensus among a group of individuals having expertise on a particular topic. It is a structured group decision-making process where, through iterative feedback, the opinions of a panel of experts are elicited and consensus is reached. In this mini assignment, you are required to develop a mini proposal to apply the DELPHI method to a problem/issue of your choice. First, think of a problem/issue (preferably from your industry or field of study) that may lend itself for investigation by the DELPHI approach (you will need to do some general reading to inform your thinking here). Then, following the example of Keil et al (2013), structure your writing as follows: (a) provide a brief background to the problem/issue; (b) explain why the problem/issue is important; (c) explain what data/information is required to help address the problem/issue and why you think the data/information is currently unavailable or of limited availability to justify conducting a DELPHI research study (needless to say, there is little or no need of doing research if the information required to address a problem/issue is already available); (d) explain why DELPHI method is the most appropriate method to provide the required data/information (here, read about when to use DELPHI or the circumstances under which DELPHI is appropriate); (e) finally, outline some research questions (about 2 3 research questions) that will be addressed by your DELPHI study. Then briefly describe how your DELPHI study will be implemented. Here, structure your writing as follows; (a) describe how you will select the experts for the study and suggest/justify how many experts you think will be appropriate (here, refer to procedures for selecting experts in Okoli et al 2004); (b) describe the type of data that you will collect (e.g. rankings or ratings) and how the data will be collected (here, refer to Keil et al., 2013; in particular, develop a chart summarising the process of your data collection similar to Figure 1 in Keil et al., 2013); (c) state the methods that you will use to analyse the data; (d) finally, briefly explain how the results from your data analysis will answer the identified research questions and how they will ultimately address the problem/issue identified at the beginning of the study. Note: Structure your narrative in a continuous prose (no bullet points or outline numbers e.g. a, b, c etc). Reference (available from the reading list on blackboard) Keil, M., Lee, H., Deng, T. (2013), Understanding the most critical skills for managing IT projects: A Delphi study of IT project managers, Information & Management, 50: 398 414 Okoli, C. and Pawlowski, S. D. (2004) The Delphi method as a research tool: an example, design considerations and applications. Information and Management, 42(1):15-29.