4.2.6 Getting agreement to the chosen solution It is important to establish consensus as far as possible within the project team on the best solution, and to record your decision. Depending on your reporting arrangements and the severity of the problem, you may then need to prepare a formal report with recommendations for action and take it to the project sponsor(s) for agreement. Solutions have to be ‘sold’ to ensure that they are acceptable.
4.2.5 Choosing the best option When you have collected a broad range of options, each possible solution should be assessed for its feasibility. As the feasible options are narrowed down, you may choose to analyse three or four in detail. Appraise the possible consequences of implementing each of these, against your criteria for cost, time and quality.
1 The planning phase Once the project brief has been agreed by the project sponsors and approved by the main stakeholders, you can move into the detailed planning phase. The project plan can become a working tool that helps to keep the project team focused on the project's tasks and activities and points them towards completion. It enables managers to keep track of resources, time and progress towards achieving objectives. All projects are different and the planning for each will be different. The difficult
7.2 The importance of the market and the state: neo-liberalism and neo-Marxism To begin with neo-liberalism, it is a key premise that the market is the primary means of coordinating economic activity, including the allocation of people to jobs. This assumes that rational actors make judgements about their earnings prospects to decide their best options – training to improve employability, as in Mandy's case, or accepting subsistence-level earnings, as Tamarla Owens did. To neo-liberals, both Mandy and Tamarla Owens would have used information they gleaned in their eve
Introduction This unit takes one aspect of the debate concerning the new economy – innovation in the form of the introduction of information and communication technologies – and places it in the historical context of industrial revolutions. Is the new economy really new or ‘just another’ industrial revolution? This unit is an adapted extract from the course Economics and economic change (
5.4 Inclusion and exclusion Contemporary Europe is, like that of earlier times, divided on several counts and reflects the continuing existence of several major identities. Individuals and groups invariably have several, overlapping or nested, identities at the same time. But there is also a hierarchy of different identities, with some groups having preferential access to particular European values and resources and others being partly or wholly excluded from them. Contemporary patterns of inclusion and exclusion
5.2.4 Risk treatment The risk treatment task is again carried out at unit level, in light of polices set out in Stages 1 to 3. The risks treated are those chosen for control at Stage 6. Stage 7: select control objectives and controls For each risk chosen for control at Stage 6, a suitable control (countermeasure) must be selected from those suggested in the Standard or from elsewhere. The risks are treated in order of priority, according to the priority levels as
4.1.2 Stateless servers Web servers are what are known as stateless servers. What this means is that in their pure form they keep no memory of what has previously happened to them between requests; for example, when a request is processed by a web server for a page they have no direct knowledge about whether the page request was made by the same browser that asked for a previous page to be returned. While this was not serious when web servers were being mainly used for dispensing documentation (their or
3.5.2 Link checking sites The World Wide Web contains millions of web pages. Many of these pages are impossible to read, even though many existing web pages will reference them: your browser will usually return with some message such as ‘Error 404 Page not Found’ when you try to access them. Error 404 is a standard message returned by web servers when a non-existent page is accessed. It is also the telephone area code for Atlanta in the United States; you will occasionally hear technical staff referring to non-exi
5.1 Genetic databases and disease Section 2 looked at data and information from two different perspectives: that of the individual and that of commercial organisation. The type of data you have will dictate both why you want to process it using a computer and, to a large extent, how that is done. This section contains two short case studies whose unifying theme is that the computer and its programs are tools for working with data. The two studies provide an interesting contrast between:
4.2.2 Using the web more effectively: gateways A gateway on the web is a website intended to direct users to other preselected websites containing information on a particular topic. It can also refer to a computer that acts as a message router on the internet University librarians often set up gateways for particular areas of study, although they may be set up by anyone with sufficient expertise in a topic. Gateways may be fairly general, such as a gateway site for sciences, or more specific, such as a gateway for part
3.5 Summary This section examined how human beings obtain data in the first place, by turning sensory data into something that can be communicated and reasoned about. We ‘code’ this data using signs and symbols that are agreed within a community. The section explored, again, the distinction between data and information, and noted that one person's data could be another's information. It went on to describe how humans invented computers because we have a compelli
3.3 Stage 2: Gathering the course material together You will need to gather all your course material and lecture notes together, and organise them properly. Your course material or texts should contain an overview of your course. Keep this to hand, as it will prove invaluable in you come to identify the topics you will need to revise. There are also other sources of information that you can draw on when gathering information for your revision. 5.1.6 Are the conclusions justified? Though I was interested in the idea of treating high incomes as ‘pollution’, I did wonder whether taxing people to pay for the pollution caused by their rising incomes would work. In general though I was reasonably convinced by the conclusions Layard drew. On the other hand, if I was studying the subject more seriously, I might find that wider reading and further thought would make some of the conclusions seem less convincing. 2.4.5 Reflecting on communication skills Communication can be approached in terms of the skills needed to get a hoped-for response. By seeing communication in terms of skills, it is easier to focus on what skills you already have and use. Once you have a reasonably clear picture about this, it is much easier to see where you might want to act to increase your communication strengths and decrease any weaknesses. It can be useful to try assessing what you see as someone else’s communication skills before you think about your o 3 Key skills assessment units This section gives advice and guidance to help you compile and present a portfolio of selected work. You are strongly advised to read through this section so that you have an idea of what is expected. The key skills assessment units provide an opportunity for you to integrate your development of key skills with your work or study. You may choose to concentrate on skills that you need to develop and improve for your job, for a new course, or personally to help you keep abreast of new dev 2.4 See what you can do on the web The web is immense, made up of information held on computers across the world. You can find out things about any subject or topic you care to name, however obscure it might be. The section entitled Searching later in this unit provides advice and tips on searching the web and finding what you want. 3.1 Introduction The following PDF document contains pages from Section 11 of the Open University publication ‘The Legal Framework’, which was written for the OU Masters Programme in Education. 2.3.1 Analysis Have as the starting point the student teacher's perceptions and concerns about the lessons. Consider the evidence collected and impressions formed. Identify the various strengths of the lesson. This is particularly important, as student teachers can become demoralised if the discussion concentrates only on their weaknesses and suggestions for change. Identify those aspects that could usefully have been don Acknowledgements The content acknowledged below is Proprietary (see terms and conditions). This content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material in this unit:
Activity 2: Meeting legal requirements in Scotland
Author(s):
