Abstract

The Industrial Engineering capstone projects at the Tecnológico de Monterrey (ITESM) are normally of high uncertainty: scopes poorly defined by the company; variable levels of collaboration with company personnel; ignorance about the company and some technical methods by the students. In the Feb-Jun 2020 semester, this complexity increased due to the COVID19 contingency. Managing academic projects under these levels of uncertainty to achieve satisfaction of students, clients and teachers is indeed a challenge.

The article presents the results of a methodological innovation for managing full-immersion projects using the SCRUM-based Project Management tropicalized to academic projects. The pilot test was carried out in the Feb-Jun 2020 semester with 30 students. The experimentation group (5 projects) used scrum with 3 sprints, weekly 20-minute Scrum meetings and 3 complete, customer-validated deliverables. The control group (3 projects) used a project charter, progress presentation and deliverables at the end of the semester. The exit surveys answered by students, company and professors show that agile project management improved the experience and results for all involved, evidence supported by Analysis of Variance with a 5% level of significance.

Keywords

Agile Management, Scrum, Capstone Project, Change management