Your topic was approved with a company’s name in it. You sent the letter of introduction to the human resources office three weeks ago, you have called twice, and nothing has come back. The defence date has not moved. This is the most common way a business administration project in Nigeria stalls, and it is fixable in a week if you stop waiting for a reply and change what you are asking for.
Why the company has not replied
A company has no obligation to help a student, and most letters give it no reason to. The standard departmental letter of introduction says that you are a bona fide student researching the impact of something on the organisation, and asks for cooperation. Read from the other side, that is a request for an unknown amount of staff time, with an unknown output that might name the company, signed by nobody the manager knows. It goes into a tray. The second reason is that the letter reached the wrong desk: human resources can approve a staff questionnaire, but the document you need for a financial topic sits with the accountant, and the interview you need sits with a line manager, and none of them has been asked. The third reason is the word confidential. If your topic touches customers, pricing, credit or staff records, the company cannot say yes even if it wants to, and silence is the polite form of no. Each of these has a different fix, and all three fixes start with a new letter, not a third phone call.
The access letter that gets a yes
Write one page, addressed to a named person, and attach the departmental letter behind it rather than sending it alone. The page has five short parts. What you are studying, in one sentence with the variables named. Exactly what you need from the company, itemised: a 15-minute interview with two managers, a questionnaire to staff of one department that takes ten minutes, and the last three years of the published annual report. How long it will take them, added up, in minutes. What you will do with it: the company is anonymised in the bound copy if they prefer, no customer or personal data is collected, and the raw data is destroyed after the defence. What they get back: a two-page summary of findings, which is the only thing in the letter that costs you nothing and changes the answer. Then find a route to the named person. A lecturer who consults for the firm, an alumnus in the branch, a family friend on the staff, the church or mosque contact: in Nigerian organisations the letter that is handed over by someone the manager knows is answered, and the one that arrives by email is not. The guide to what to do when a project topic is rejected puts it as the gatekeeper test, and it applies after approval as much as before.
What a company will give you, and what it never will
| Source | Usually available | Who approves | Rarely or never available |
|---|---|---|---|
| Published documents | Annual reports and audited financial statements of listed companies, company profile, organisational chart, published policies | Nobody: listed companies file results and disclosures with the Nigerian Exchange and most host them on their own investor pages | Management accounts, budgets, board papers |
| Staff questionnaire | A short instrument to one department or branch, distributed through the HR office | Human resources manager or branch manager | A census of all staff; questions on pay, discipline or grievances |
| Interviews | Two to five managers or supervisors, 15 to 30 minutes each | The managers themselves, after HR is aware | Recorded interviews with executives; anything about litigation |
| Operational records | Aggregated figures the company already reports: sales by month, staff turnover rate, complaint counts | The department head who owns the figure | Customer lists, credit files, transaction data, anything identifying an individual |
The table decides the design. If your topic needs the right-hand column, change the topic now; nothing on the right will be released to an undergraduate in time, and a panel knows it. If it needs the left-hand column, you can finish, and most business administration topics do: motivation and performance, training and productivity, leadership style and job satisfaction, inventory practice and cost, all of them live in staff responses, manager interviews and published figures.
Diagnosis: three sources, one research question
A company-based project is a case study, and the design has a name and a citation your panel expects: Robert K. Yin’s Case Study Research and Applications: Design and Methods, sixth edition, Sage, 2018 in most reference lists, whose second chapter is titled Case Study Research Designs. State that the study adopts a single-case design with the company as the case and the department or branch as the unit of analysis, and that evidence is triangulated from documents, a questionnaire and interviews. Then make the three sources answer the same questions. For a topic on training and employee performance: the annual report gives the training spend and headcount for three years, the staff questionnaire gives perceived training adequacy and self-rated performance on four-point items, and the two interviews give the manager’s account of how training is allocated. Chapter Four presents each research question with all three sources under it, and the discussion says where they agree and where they do not. That convergence is what a case study is marked on; a questionnaire alone with the company’s name on the cover is a survey with a smaller sample.
Sample sizes follow the usual rules with the company’s own figures as the population. The staff establishment of the department, obtained from HR or the organisational chart, is the N for the sample-size calculation in the guide to writing Chapter Three section by section; the number of interviews and the saturation argument for a small management sample are in the answer to how many respondents a qualitative project needs. Record the interviews on your phone with consent, and use free tools that transcribe and code them without a budget.
Ethics, confidentiality and the Data Protection Act
Three promises in the access letter become three obligations in the project. First, anonymity of the company if it was requested: the bound copy calls it a manufacturing company in Ogun State or a deposit money bank in Lagos, the real name appears only in the letter of introduction on file with the department, and the annual report is cited in a form your supervisor agrees does not identify it. Second, no personal data beyond the questionnaire: no names, staff numbers or phone numbers on the instrument, and the consent statement on its first page. Third, the statute. The Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023 makes whoever determines the purpose and manner of processing a data controller, which for this project is you, and consent is among the recognised lawful bases; the practical steps for a questionnaire under the Act, and the older 2019 regulation that many templates still wrongly cite, are set out in the comparison of Google Forms, KoboToolbox and paper for project data. If the company asks you to sign a non-disclosure form, sign it, keep a copy, and tell your supervisor, because it may restrict what the appendix can contain.
Writing it up: the two sections a case study adds
Chapter Three gains a section that a survey project does not have, usually headed Profile of the Organisation or Brief History of the Case Organisation, placed after the research design and before the population. Six to ten sentences: what the company does, when it was established, its size in staff and branches from the annual report, the department studied and why it was chosen. Cite every figure. Chapter Four gains a structure: for each research question, the documentary evidence first, then the questionnaire table, then the interview finding, then two sentences on convergence. The guide to writing Chapter Four covers the tables; the case-study addition is the convergence sentence under each of them. Chapter Five gains one limitation the panel will raise if you do not: a single-case design describes this company and supports analytic, not statistical, generalisation. Write it in those words, then say what a multiple-case study across three firms in the sector could test next. That paragraph turns the design’s weakness into the recommendation for further study.
If the company still says no in week three
Keep the topic and change the design. Two switches are accepted in every department. The documentary case study uses only public sources: three to five years of a listed company’s annual reports and disclosures, analysed for the variables in your topic, with ratio analysis or trend tables in Chapter Four and no fieldwork at all; the company cannot refuse what it has already published. The multiple small-firm study replaces one large company with ten to twenty small businesses in a market or industrial cluster you can walk into, where the owner is the gatekeeper and the interview happens the same afternoon. Write a half-page memo to your supervisor stating the access problem, the proposed switch and the unchanged research questions, and ask for a signature on it; that memo is the document that protects you at defence when a panel member asks why the named company disappeared. The three matched objectives, questions and hypotheses stay exactly as approved, in the form shown for a management topic in the worked examples of research questions and hypotheses for a marketing project.
Where Tesify fits in a company project
The weeks lost waiting are usually recovered in the writing, and that is where Tesify does its work. Paste the approved topic and the company profile and it drafts the Chapter Three research design paragraph as a single-case study with triangulated sources, the profile of the organisation section from the figures you supply, and the population and sampling paragraphs around the staff establishment you obtained. Paste the questionnaire results and the interview summaries and it drafts Chapter Four in the source-by-source structure under each research question, with the convergence sentences left for you to judge. The automatic bibliography formats Yin, the annual reports and the Act in your department’s style, and the AI editor tightens the prose without changing a figure. The free plan is the starting point and asks for no card; everything above is drafted from your own data, in your own words after editing, which is the only way the project survives a similarity check and a panel.
Draft the case-study Chapter Three while the letter is out
Start with the free plan, paste your approved topic and the company profile, and have the research design, the profile of the organisation and the sampling section drafted before the company replies. When the data arrives, Chapter Four follows the same structure.
Frequently asked questions
Can I do a final year project on a company that has not given me permission?
Yes, as a documentary case study using only what the company has published: annual reports, audited statements, disclosures and its own website. Fieldwork inside the company needs its consent; analysis of its public documents does not.
Should I name the company in my project?
Name it in the topic submitted to the department and in the letter of introduction. In the bound copy, use the real name only if the company agreed; otherwise describe it generically and tell your supervisor the arrangement.
How many interviews do I need for a company case study?
Two to five managers or supervisors is the usual range for an undergraduate single-case study, with the saturation argument stated in Chapter Three, alongside a staff questionnaire and the documents.
Is a case study on one company acceptable for a business administration project?
Yes. State it as a single-case design after Yin, name the unit of analysis, triangulate documents, questionnaire and interviews, and write the analytic-generalisation limitation in Chapter Five.
Does Tesify write the project for me?
No. It drafts the chapters from the topic, profile and data you paste in, and you edit and defend every sentence. Submitting text you did not shape and cannot explain fails both the similarity check and the defence.
Will a Tesify draft pass the plagiarism check?
Drafts are generated from your own inputs, not copied from existing documents, and the passages you cite are your responsibility to quote and reference. Run your department’s similarity check before submission as you would for any draft.
How much does Tesify cost?
The free plan is the entry point and needs no card. Paid plan prices are shown on the Tesify site, where local payment options are listed.
What if the company asks me to sign a confidentiality agreement?
Sign it, keep a copy, and inform your supervisor at once. It usually means the company is anonymised and raw data stays out of the appendix; it rarely prevents the project.