1.5 Term Project - Overview and Weekly Deliverables

Throughout this course, a major activity is a location intelligence project that you will develop and research on your own (with some input from everyone else taking the course). To ensure that you make regular progress toward completion of the term-long project, I will assign project activities for you to complete each week.

The topic of the project is completely up to you, but you will have to get the topic approved. Pick a topic of interest and use the different methods applied during this class to better understand the topic. Some topics considered include:

• Location intelligence, Resources & Synergies Development (R&SD), operations, services, sales and business development, marketing, C-suite decision making, procurement, supply chain management, or telecommunications;
• Not just digital customer experiences, also optimizing the use of building and manufacturing space;
• Production machines talking to one another through connected sensors and IoT;
• City infrastructure sensing activity or phenomena, reporting the occurrence locally, and responding with safety, efficiency, recommendations for correction.

You will need to demonstrate what you have learned throughout the course. Your grade will be based upon demonstrating an understanding of:

• demographic and market segmentation;
• trade areas; natural and man-made features affecting business opportunities; sales forecasting/market penetration;
• site characteristics typically investigated in the site selection process;
• solving or contributing to the solution of a business problem using geospatial analysis methods; and
• tools such as reports and maps; and how they inform market research, site selection, or support business decisions.

Take time this week to consider the following:

1. What would you like to focus on—a broad market analysis, a site selection problem, leveraging indoor or digital location analytics, or something else?
2. What level of geography would you like to work with? What location?
3. What steps might you take in your research? Is the data readily available (or can you gather it and incorporate it, using the tools at our disposal)?
4. Start a journal of your Term Project to use as you progress through project steps. Include a Reference section to record all pertinent information for properly citing the published works you include. A well organized LIterature Review leads to your Bibliography and in text, footnote, or endnote citations.

This week, the project activity is to become familiar with the weekly term project activities and to think about possible topics. Each week, the project activity requirements for that week will be spelled out in more detail on a page labeled Term Project, located in the regular course menu.

Note: All Term Project related work and deliverables will be submitted in Canvas during weeks 2, 3, 4, 6, 8 and 10.

Approach to a Location Intelligence Project

Design and follow a systematic approach to your project as you examine the problem, objectives, and decision making process. Lessons 1 – 4 will introduce geospatial and business principles used to form location intelligence. The lessons build a case for solving your location-based problem by asking a relevant business question, gathering and enriching data, applying geospatial analysis, uncovering factors, patterns, and contributing phenomena.

Week by Week Activities of the Term Project

Below is an outline of the weekly project activities for the Term Projects. You should refer back to this page periodically as a handy guide to the project 'milestones'. NOTE: I highly recommend keeping a regular journal of your activities on the Term Project. If you do this carefully enough, then the final report for the project should almost write itself!