Tom Walters recently accepted a new position at his college as the Director of I

Question

Tom Walters recently accepted a new position at his college as the Director of Information Technology. Tom had been a respected faculty member at the college for the past fifteen years. The college—a small, private college in the Southwest—offered a variety of programs in the liberal arts and professional areas. Enrollment included 1500 full-time traditional students and about 1000 working-adult students attending an evening program. Many instructors supplemented their courses with information on the Internet and course Web sites, but they did not offer any distance-learning programs. The college’s niche was serving students in that region who liked the setting of a small Objectives T may be reproduced without prior permission in writing from Course Technology. Some of the product names and company names have been used for identification purposes only and may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective manufactures and sellers. Copyright © 2005 by Course Technology. All rights reserved. This publication is protected by federal copyright law. No part of this publication THE PROJECT MANAGEMENT AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY CONTEXT 39 liberal arts college. Like most colleges, its use of information technology had grown tremendously in the past five years. There were a few classrooms on campus with computers for the instructors and students, and a few more with just instructor stations and projection systems. Tom knew that several colleges throughout the country required that all students lease laptops and that these colleges incorporated technology components into most courses. This idea fascinated him. He and two other members of the Information Technology department visited a local college that had required all students to lease laptops for the past three years, and they were very impressed with what they saw and heard. Tom and his staff developed plans to start requiring students to lease laptops at their college the next year. Tom sent an e-mail to all faculty and staff in September, which briefly described this and other plans. He did not get much response, however, until the February faculty meeting when, as he described some of the details of his plan, the chairs of the History, English, Philosophy, and Economics departments all voiced their opposition to the idea. They eloquently stated that the college was not a technical training school, and that they thought the idea was ludicrous. Members of the Computer Science department voiced their concern that all of their students already had state-of-the art desktop computers and would not want to pay a mandatory fee to lease less-powerful laptops. The director of the adult education program expressed her concern that many adult-education students would balk at an increase in fees. Tom was in shock to hear his colleagues’ responses, especially after he and his staff had spent a lot of time planning details of how to implement laptops at their campus. Now what should he do.

Is Agile Right for Tom Walters' Project?

Think about the Tom Walters case from chapter 2 in Schwalbe and whether an agile approach could be applied to the project. Using the statements below, answer and discuss using at least three bulleted points to support your claim.

Agile is best for a project when…
• Project exhibits high variability in requirements
• Team members have a high knowledge base and can learn quickly
• Team members must be willing to adapt to change
• Resources for the project are easily accessible
• Customer is highly involved and in close proximity to the project
• Value of the product to be delivered is very important to the customer
• Manager must be comfortable with a facilitator role

Explanation / Answer

The Agile approach could not be applied to the project because the project does not exhibit high variability as it was an arts college and most of the content of teaching as well as syllabus of the students would remain same throughout the semester or for the duration of the course.

Also there was issue regarding the usage of laptops as the team members were from different departments, which included department of history and other art faculties. The people from these departments generally do not had much knowledge base about the usage of information technology in their departments.

At the same time members from other department were not ready to adapt to the change. They thought that use of laptop and leasing it would increaes the fee, which would be opposed by the working class.

The resource which was laptop in the present case was also not available readily as the students wrere required to pay for the laptops in the from of fees. Hence there was apprehension that the students would oppose the leasing as it would increase fees.

Thus, from the above points it is quite clear that Agile method would not be appropriate in the present case.

Related Questions

Navigate

• Browse (All)
• Browse T
• Subjects

Integrity-first tutoring: explanations and feedback only — we do not complete graded work. Learn more.