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If you are writing an MS thesis or a PhD dissertation, the Graduate School requires an outline. For a dissertation, EECE Graduate Student Handbook requires a proposal. You might be able to get away with doing these near the end of your project, by I strongly recommend you complete them early and that you complete them well.

Why?

#1 Project management. A dissertation is an engineering project, and it benefits from being managed like one. The risk of scope creep and schedule slip is VERY high. No one would consider undertaking a 1-2 year engineering project with a two page Statement of Work, but that is what you are doing. The cost to you of a loose plan is surely AT LEAST an extra semester of lost income, and probably more.

#2 Specification. Related to #1. No good engineer would undertake a 1-2 year project without a clearly specified acceptance test. How will you and your client (your committee) know you are done? Without a tight specification for the output, it is likely that you do work that turns out to be unnecessary, and it is likely that the committee will add scope (work) beyond what was originally intended. The cost to you of a loose project specification is the possibility of committee members continuing to ask, "Yes, that's good, but now you need to do this too."

#3 Protection. You may know colleagues who thought they were done, but one committee member or another kept insisting that they add one chapter after another, resulting in MAJOR delay in graduating. If you have a tight specification, and everyone on the committee agrees in advance that if you do what your plan says, we'll call it a degree; and you DO what your plan says; then it is a little harder for a committee member to demand more. A good Statement of Work protects engineers from unreasonably demanding clients. The time to agree on a Statement of Work is before the project begins.