Divide and Conquer

Time has proven the effectiveness of the classical divide and conquer strategy and this strategy is no longer limited to just fighting. As a matter of fact, this old strategy is used in a variety of subjects from computer processing to political arguments. Likewise, most projects can be divided into different portions to aid researchers in gauging their progress. Personally, I divided my project into research, writing, scheduling, and technology portions. 

For the most part, writing is going fine, but I have run into a minor researching hindrance. Initially, I planned to write the ‘History of Social Federal Programs in U.S.’ page under the history menu to provide a helpful summary of welfare in the United States based on the facts found in the ‘Cheering for a team no longer on the field: Rhetoric and reality in American welfare history’ scholarly source to make sure that my summary is historically accurate (1). However, as I began to write that page I realized that having another historical source would add depth and accuracy to the page. After some consideration, I decided to find a book on welfare history rather than an article to both satisfy my need for a secondary historical source and fulfill the long scholarly source requirement of the project. When I started to research, I struggled to find a book that matched my needs. This did not surprise me because most of my researching experience was aimed at finding scholarly articles and not longer sources like books. Finally, I used JSTOR Labs Text Analyzer to find Welfare State Institutions and Labor Market Trends (2). Despite focusing on the effects of job loss on economic insecurity, the author dedicates a section to welfare that is aimed to help individuals that lost their jobs in both the United Staes and Germany. Except for the welfare book, all my research is complete and I am incorporating the facts that I found in the scholarly articles and survey to support my reasoning and conclusions.

Another important aspect of the project is scheduling. When defining project management, the scholarly article titled ‘The role of project management in achieving project success’ included the following three attributes, “….planning the execution of the work, monitoring the progress of the work, and adjusting deviations from the plan.”(3) This was done to emphasize the importance of scheduling when it comes to performing a project. Shockingly, designing a simple schedule can sometimes be a challenging task, especially during a time when virtually every course has had to change there work schedule. Despite these hectic times, most of the work is being done on time. 

Lastly, the technological portion of a project is the most general of the four portions since it can include anything from the software being used to present the project to the social media platforms being used for communication between team members. Personally, the main technological challenge that I have faced so far, is navigating the databanks to find scholarly articles, surveys, and books. Normally, I consider research to be half the work of any project partly because of the search algorithms of library websites. In order to find materials addressing a certain subject, I normally end up needing to do five or more different searches with synonymous words to actually find what I am looking for. Moreover, the web filters are not perfect so I sometimes get sources that are not peer-reviewed or sources that I can not have full access to. These technological flaws can get tedious especially when combined with the challenge of analyzing the often wordy sources.

Footnotes:

1.Levine, Daniel. “Cheering for a Team No Longer on the Field: Rhetoric and Reality in American Welfare History.” Journal of Economic Issues, vol. 35, no. 3, 2001, pp. 733–742., doi:10.1080/00213624.2001.11506398.

2.Ehlert, Martin. “Welfare State Institutions and Labor Market Trends.” In The Impact of Losing Your Job: Unemployment and Influences from Market, Family, and State on Economic Well-Being in the US and Germany, 69-82. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016. Accessed April 8, 2020. doi:10.2307/j.ctt1gsmw6t.6.

3.Munns, AK, and BF Bjeirmi. “The Role of Project Management in Achieving Project Success.” International Journal of Project Management. Pergamon, February 22, 1999. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0263786395000577.