Holdfast Training Services Trial Blog

I’m sure all but the most organised of you have experienced something similar, even if you’ve subsequently solved the riddles and moved on!? I was hoping to get some advice that might help me make better use of my time over the coming two months.

Having extended my TMR4 deadline, then had the audacity to take a weeks leave at the end of February, I’m now beginning to feel the thesis crocodile circling closer and closer to the canoe. I’m extremely conscious of upcoming deadlines, but having gone out and collected as much data as I can, I now think that I’ve got too much and I’m struggling to refine it into useful material of the right academic level.

My thesis is on the structure of the Royal Engineers, and how we might consider re-structuring ourselves in order to better deliver effect on Operations. My basic premise is that the current historic structure (Platoons, Companies, Battalions, Regiments etc.) was/is fine for fighting wars, but pretty useless for undertaking construction tasks, not only does it seem to be an ineffective way of managing skilled tradesmen, but it also appears to leave managerial skill gaps within the command structure.

My main issue is that having obtained no less than 20 PXR/POR/PERs from the TICRE (luckily there was plenty of stuff they didn’t have or I’d have ended up with even more), together with the latest Project ANEMOI Lessons Learned document, I’m currently sitting on hundreds, probably thousands of pages of text (of varying quality and command level) that I’m attempting to evaluate in order to find reoccurring themes and patterns. I was keen to avoid any kind of selection bias by simply choosing the reports I liked the best, but in doing so I’m finding it almost impossible to pick out the most useful (and relevant) lessons learned. I could write a whole literature review on just three or four of the reports on their own, so having complied a spreadsheet of lessons learned from all 20, I’m struggling to condense them into useful (academically sound) results. So far, all I seem to have done is hand select obvious anecdotes with little further analysis. It’s like finding passages in the Bible or Koran; search long or hard enough and you’ll find something that backs up your opinion. The rest can just be discarded, even if there are a similar number of anecdotes contradicting the first. It feels like I’ve almost gone the other way and that having too much information is creating its own bias by allowing me to pick and choose what I want rather than what is actually relevant or meaningful.

Did anyone else have similar issues with regards to information overload, and if so what strategies did you employ in order to focus your efforts and obtain useful, valuable data from the sea of literature available?

PS:  Please no “I’ve almost finished my thesis you should have started earlier” comments!