Roadmap of master thesis project

In this blog post I will introduce the roadmap for the rest of this master thesis project, but first I will give a brief summary of the literature review. A very brief summary!

Central Park seen from Top Of The Rock

The main reason why it took some time since my last post was a trip to New York City (see the picture).
While I was in NYC Pieter assessed my literature study and graded it with a 9 (out of 10)! I am very pleased with that, as you can imagine.
In the literature review, some aspects were important, namely the Reference Concept Maps (RCMs), as explained here, and a taxonomy. The RCMs are used to provide the concepts within the taxonomy with a definition.
The taxonomy contains six cells which differs on two aspects. First aspect is the organizational boundaries. A concept (like a clinical guideline, protocol, etc) can occur within 1 organization or between multiple organizations. The second aspect is the number of patients involved. This can vary between 1 individual patient, 1 group of patients (having the same symptoms) or multiple group of patients. The cell under investigation in this master thesis project is the cell where 1 group of patients, and across multiple organizations is applicable. The taxonomy is shown in the picture below. The dotted arrows will be investigated during the master thesis project.

Taxonomy

Back in the Netherlands, I started with my research proposal; the second deliverable for the master thesis. In the research proposal it is the goal to specify how I will conduct my thesis. I have captured the main steps in the figure below. The first step is to select organizations which are (interested in) modeling their processes. The second step is the process model selection step. The sub-processes are shown right of the main steps. In the sub-process of the select model step, relevant process models are selected. These are used in the third step create reference models. When the reference models are created, new process models are made using the reference model as a base. Next, the new models are compared with existing models to investigate the added value and finally a conclusion is drawn.
The coming week I will focus on the evaluation step, because this will be a very important step for the succeeding of this project. I hope to inform you about my findings next week.

Roadmap to investigate added value of reference models