2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Over the past 50 years, there has been little change in the way that most academic departments in U.S. universities conduct their day-to-day affairs. Many reasons contribute to the lack of innovation in department operations, which includes;
• We have been doing this forever, and it works well, so why change it?
• Is this a high priority issue, that needs attention now?
• Are we being assessed for this, if not, then why bother?
• Change is hard, so why we ask for trouble?
The XXXX department at YYYYY university has been wrestling with the same questions for a while. In the meantime, we recognized that in recent years, many software companies have made the transition to using agile processes which resulted in delivering higher quality software within the schedule and budget. We also noticed other industries such as automobile, business, military, also started using agile processes as part of their day-to-day operations. Given the above fact, we thought we could incorporate agile processes, more specifically Scrum, as part of our department operation.

Scrum is a framework to facilitate productivity by prioritizing tasks with the highest value and by working in short time increments within a "inspect and adapt" framework. One of the fundamental principles behind the Scrum framework is the integration of the stakeholders (constituents, customers) as part of the project. This integration allows the project requirements to be adjusted during the development process, therefore we have an opportunity to adjust and respond to the needs of the stakeholder in a timely manner. In addition, regular reviews by customers and other stakeholders, and the feedback provided resulted from these reviews we could improve the quality of the final product.

Over the last four years, the XXXX department have adopted the Scrum framework as a change strategy for the operation of the EECS department. Throughout this time, we have conducted over twenty projects, where the faculty, staff, and students worked together to deliver products that were useful to the department. Based on our experiences with these projects, we noticed that the integration of the Scrum process not only improved the quality of the products that are resulted in much shorter time span, we also recognized an increase in faculty, staff and student participation. Another observation is associated with the importance of the feedback as part of the department operation. Since Scrum framework is built on the principles of inspection and adaptation, where feedback drives the inspection process, and the team adapts based on that feedback to optimize its performance and outcomes. Within engineering departments, Scrum requires departments to examine how and when feedback is obtained to ensure that the department is remaining agile. This poster illustrates the role of feedback within two Scrum teams, one focused on student success and the other focused on faculty rewards and incentives. The two cases emphasize the need for continuous introspection at team and department levels.