A doctoral project should do more than demonstrate that you can write for an academic audience. It should be useful to the people and communities you serve.
That is the idea behind the Doctor of Organizational Leadership and Innovation, or DOLI, project options at City Vision University. Too often, someone spends hundreds or thousands of hours on a dissertation that reaches only a handful of readers. The work may be rigorous, but if it is written in language that the intended community cannot use, much of its potential stays on a shelf.
We want a different outcome. Our mission is to transform lives and the world in Jesus’ name, and the doctoral project should help you do that. With permission from board member Jay Gary, we adapted a project model he developed to give students meaningful choices about what they create. The result is nine project types, ranging from a book or workshop to an organizational intervention or startup.
Flexibility does not mean less doctoral work. Every option calls for substantial original work, a review of literature, faculty review, and public resources that allow others to learn from what you have done. The difference is that your final product can take a form your community will actually use.
Key Takeaways
- Choose a doctoral project format your intended community can actually use.
- Every project pairs a literature review with substantial, format-specific work and public resources.
- Applied research is the option closest to a traditional dissertation; other types need not follow that model.
- Project flexibility creates room for creativity, not a shortcut around doctoral-level work.
Table of Contents
- The nine DOLI doctoral project types
- What every doctoral project has in common
- 1. Book: Write for the people who need the ideas
- 2. Workshop: Teach, engage, and debrief
- 3. Curriculum: Build something another instructor can teach
- 4. LMS program: Create an online learning experience
- 5. Organizational intervention: Lead change you can actually lead
- 6. Applied research: The option closest to a traditional dissertation
- 7. Startup plan: Move beyond writing the plan
- 8 and 9. Combination and hybrid projects: Use more than one format when it helps
- How to choose a project that stretches you
The nine DOLI doctoral project types
Think first about the change you hope to make and who needs to use the result. Are you trying to give leaders a resource they can read? Train a group? Equip other instructors? Change an organization? Answer a research question? Launch a new service? Those answers point toward different project types.
- Book: Write a substantial book for a defined audience.
- Workshop: Design and lead a participatory training experience.
- Curriculum: Create courses that another instructor can teach.
- Learning management system program: Build an online learning experience with original courses and recorded content.
- Organizational intervention: Lead a planned change in an organization or a part of one.
- Applied research: Conduct a project closer to a traditional research dissertation.
- Startup plan: Develop and actively pursue the launch of a nonprofit or business.
- Combination of two types: Bring together two formats that serve the same goal.
- Hybrid: Integrate multiple types into a coherent project.
The last two options matter because real work does not always fit neatly into one category. A workshop may need an e-book that participants can use afterward. A new organization may also need an online course. We want to make room for that creativity while keeping the project focused and academically substantial.
What every doctoral project has in common
The format of your final product may vary, but every DOLI doctoral project has a common foundation. You will complete deliverables specific to your chosen type, a review of literature, an Institutional Review Board application, and online resources that make your work accessible.
The doctoral project sequence includes ORG 891, ORG 892, and ORG 893. The review of literature comes early in that sequence, so do not wait until you are ready to build your final product to start collecting sources. The project-specific deliverables come later, in ORG 893. Your public-facing resources are also assembled toward the end.
The literature review and the project serve different audiences
Your review of literature is a major part of the doctoral work. It shows how your project is informed by existing ideas and research. That portion belongs to academic culture: it requires careful engagement with sources and a clear account of the knowledge behind your decisions.
Your project itself can speak in a different voice. If you are preparing community leaders to run a workshop, they need material that makes sense in their setting. If you are building a course, learners need an effective course, not a literature review pasted into an LMS. If you are starting an organization, prospective partners need to understand the proposed service and how it will work.
These are not competing goals. The literature review grounds the project; the project translates that learning into something useful. As you move through the program, keep track of sources you may need for the review and ask how they could strengthen the decisions you make in your final work.
Plan for research review early
Every student completes an Institutional Review Board, or IRB, application. If your project involves research with human participants that requires review, you will also need the related ongoing documentation. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services explains the role of IRBs for anyone who wants more background on research oversight.
Think carefully before building a project around human research subjects. Managing the review and documentation can add a great deal of work, potentially as much as the rest of the doctoral project. That does not rule out applied research. It means you should understand the commitment before choosing it, and work with your faculty member on an approach that fits your purpose.
Also, do not assume that every doctoral project requires collecting and analyzing new data. That is familiar territory in a traditional dissertation, and it is central to many applied research projects. It is not the defining requirement for a book, curriculum, workshop, startup, or every other DOLI option.
Make the finished work useful beyond the degree
We also ask students to create online resources. One part is a public Google Drive folder that functions as a toolkit for people interested in the project. It can hold the review of literature, project materials, doctoral presentation slides, relevant Gemini deep research reports, and documents or templates that would help peers build on the work. The goal is not simply to upload files. It is to give someone a practical way into what you have learned and created.
The plan is to link student resources from a page on cityvision.edu. Those resources include a public NotebookLM containing the final project and research from across the doctoral program, along with publicly available citations from the project and literature review. A public Zotero bibliography gives others another route to the sources behind the work.
Students also create a Substack site with at least four posts as a public research and distribution channel. The materials include at least two audio overviews drawn from coursework or the project. A final post links to the recording of the doctoral project presentation, the public NotebookLM, the Google Drive folder, and the public bibliography.
This is an important part of the philosophy of the program. If you have done the work to develop a valuable project, make it possible for other people to find it, understand it, and use it.
1. Book: Write for the people who need the ideas
A book may be the most straightforward choice if your goal is to make a sustained argument or offer practical guidance to a particular audience. Start by identifying that audience. A book meant for leaders in a community organization should be shaped around what those leaders need to understand and do.
The DOLI book project is approximately 90 to 110 pages. Going beyond that range may be possible, but be realistic about faculty review. Asking a faculty member to read and respond to a 500-page manuscript is a very different request from asking them to review a doctoral project within the expected scope.
You will select a publisher or publishing approach. If you intend to self-publish, a university press format using Chicago style is a sound option to consider; a particular publisher may have its own formatting requirements. The Chicago Manual of Style is a useful reference when making those decisions.
The book is accompanied by the review of literature and the common doctoral project deliverables. But remember why you chose a book in the first place: the final manuscript needs to work as a book for its readers, not simply as an academic document with a new cover.
2. Workshop: Teach, engage, and debrief
Choose the workshop format when people need to practice and discuss an idea together. A DOLI workshop is a substantial training experience of at least seven hours with a minimum of eight participants. It may take place in person or virtually.
It cannot be seven hours of uninterrupted presentation. The experience should be participatory: teach something, engage participants with it, and make room to debrief what they have learned. That structure turns information into an experience participants can apply.
The project includes a presentation covering the workshop sections and participant evaluations. You will also prepare an after-action report. That report matters because leading the workshop is only part of the work; you also need to reflect on what happened, what participants contributed, and how the experience could be improved.
A workshop is a good fit when your intended result depends on interaction. If your goal is to train people to do something, the learning process itself may be the most useful doctoral product you can create.
3. Curriculum: Build something another instructor can teach
A curriculum project is not just a collection of lessons you know how to deliver. It is designed so that someone else can take your materials and teach the courses. Think of it as a teach-the-teacher project.
The project includes one to five original courses and a faculty guide for each course. The guide is what makes the curriculum transferable. Another instructor should be able to understand the purpose of a course, use the materials, and carry the teaching forward without relying on you to explain every choice.
That requirement changes how you develop the work. It is not enough to gather strong content. You need a course structure, teaching guidance, and the related components that allow another faculty member to put the curriculum into practice. If your vision is to equip a group of instructors or help an organization teach consistently, this format may serve that goal better than a book or a single workshop.
4. LMS program: Create an online learning experience
A learning management system project is the option for an online course program. The minimum is four original LMS courses and five hours of recording. The project calls for predominantly original content, with an 85 percent original-content benchmark and a limited portion drawn from public sources.
The program needs the elements that make an online course usable, including a program introduction, syllabus, course materials, and the other details needed to guide learning in the LMS. Your faculty member will need access to the system, so plan to provide a login for review.
Ideally, people would actually take the courses. Whether that is viable depends on your context, and it is something to discuss with your faculty member. If learners do take the program, gather survey feedback. That gives you a way to learn from their experience rather than evaluating the course only from the creator’s side.
The distinction between this option and a curriculum project is worth considering. A curriculum is built so another instructor can teach it. An LMS program is built as an online learning environment. Both require thoughtful instructional design, but the final experience you deliver is different.
5. Organizational intervention: Lead change you can actually lead
An organizational intervention is for a planned change in an existing organization. You may have a compelling idea for improving the whole organization, but authority matters. You need to be the primary lead on the intervention, or you need authorization from the person who can give you that responsibility.
Suppose you direct one program area but do not have authority to change every department. A whole-organization intervention would be difficult to lead responsibly. A change within your division may be a stronger project. Alternatively, the CEO or another appropriate leader could empower you to lead a broader effort.
The work begins with an intervention proposal and timeline. It also draws on a change model from the organizational change course. Organizational assessments, presentations, and other documents used in the change plan help show what you proposed and how you carried it out.
Do not choose the largest possible intervention simply because it sounds impressive. Choose a meaningful change for which you can take real responsibility. A well-led intervention in a division has more value than an ambitious plan for an entire organization that you have no authority to implement.
6. Applied research: The option closest to a traditional dissertation
If you came into a doctoral program expecting a research topic, literature review, methodology, data collection, and analysis, applied research will feel familiar. It is the DOLI type that most closely resembles a traditional dissertation.
You will identify a research topic and purpose, develop the research approach with faculty guidance, and address the relevant requirements for collecting and analyzing data. In many cases, this type of project may require IRB review and ongoing research documentation.
Applied research is a good choice when answering a research question is itself the contribution you want to make. But it is only one of the nine types. You do not need to force a workshop, book, curriculum, or startup into a traditional dissertation structure if that structure does not serve the project.
That distinction is freeing, but it should also help you choose honestly. If your central goal is to investigate a question through research, choose the option designed for it. If your central goal is to equip people with a practical tool or lead a change, consider the formats built around those outcomes.
7. Startup plan: Move beyond writing the plan
A startup project can focus on a nonprofit or a business. Its end goal is not a polished document that sits in a folder. We want you to engage with the market and work toward launching what you propose.
The work may include establishing the organization, developing an overall business plan, and building a business model canvas and value proposition canvas. A marketing plan and materials may also be part of the project. Depending on the proposed launch, that could mean a website, blog, podcast, articles, or other resources needed to introduce the organization and its work.
Consider a Christian counseling practice as an example. Writing about the idea would be only one step. The project could also involve analyzing how the practice would operate, creating the plan, establishing its public presence, and taking the practical steps required to get it started.
The question to keep asking is simple: What would have to exist for this organization to begin serving people? Let that answer shape the work. A startup plan has doctoral value when the planning is connected to real-world decisions and action.
8 and 9. Combination and hybrid projects: Use more than one format when it helps
Sometimes the right answer is not a single deliverable. A workshop may be more useful when paired with an ebook participants can consult later. A startup may need an LMS program to deliver its training. An organizational intervention may include a workshop that prepares people for the change.
The combination of two types gives you a way to join two project formats. A hybrid can bring together multiple types. These are not invitations to collect unrelated ideas into an oversized project. The parts should support one another and serve a clear purpose.
Ask what each component contributes. If removing a component would leave your intended community without something essential, it may belong. If it adds work without making the result more useful, it may not. Work with your faculty member to define the scope and deliverables so the combined project remains coherent and reviewable.
How to choose a project that stretches you
Start with the people you hope to serve, then work backward toward the form. What would they be able to use? A leader may need a book. A team may need a workshop. Other instructors may need a curriculum. An organization may need someone to lead an intervention. A new service may need to be launched.
Next, consider what you can realistically lead and complete. Do you have the authority needed for an intervention? Can you recruit participants for a workshop? Can faculty access the online program you plan to build? If you propose research with human participants, have you accounted for the review and documentation it may require? These questions are not barriers for the sake of barriers. They help turn a good idea into a project you can actually deliver.
Finally, look for the stretch. We offer these options because we want doctoral work to be creative and useful, not because we want students to relabel their ordinary day-to-day responsibilities as a project. Accreditation and academic expectations still apply. You need to do substantial work that takes you beyond what you were already doing.
One phrase we use in the program is that what got you here will not get you there. Think of the doctoral project as coaching toward that next level. The aim is not simply to finish a requirement. It is to create something grounded in research, responsive to your community, and demanding enough to develop you as a leader.
Choose the format that gives your work its best chance to make a difference, and bring questions about scope or requirements to your faculty member early. The right doctoral project will challenge you while giving other people something they can genuinely use.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does every DOLI doctoral project require original data collection?
No. Data collection and analysis are associated most closely with applied research. Other project types focus on creating or leading a substantial practical product, alongside the common doctoral requirements.
Can I complete a doctoral project within my current organization?
Yes, an organizational intervention can take place in your organization if you can lead the change or have been authorized to do so. The project must also stretch beyond simply documenting your normal day-to-day work.
Can I combine a workshop with another project type?
Yes. The combination and hybrid options allow related formats to work together. Discuss the scope and required deliverables with your faculty member so the components form one coherent project.
Should I begin collecting sources before the doctoral project courses?
Yes. The review of literature is due early in the project sequence, so keep track of relevant research as you progress through the program.