You’re In Charge — Now Do It My Way
February 17, 2008 – 4:24 pmThe project course I’m teaching this term has forty-six students in it, who are working on twenty-five projects. Some are going very well, but some teams are still trying to get the code their clients have given them to compile or run. The main reason seems to be time management: this is just one course among five for most students, and unlike their others, it doesn’t have regular assignments or deadlines every few weeks. That makes it very easy for students to push it aside because something else has to be done by [tomorrow, Friday, next week].
Now, I know from experience that if I set deadlines every couple of weeks, students will find a way to meet them, just as they do in their other courses. However, I also know that doing that robs students of a chance to learn how to manage their time. That, writing, and budgeting are the holy trinity of consulting: everything else can be fudged, but if you can’t keep yourself focused on the things that actually matter, explain what you’re doing, and manage your money, you’ll never make it on your own.
So, what could I do to help them? I have given them the sermon about “don’t put this off until the end of term unless you really want a C-”, and they all understand it intellectually, but it’s clear that a substantial minority still don’t get it in their gut. Regular progress reports don’t help, since students regard them (rightly, I think) as yet another distraction from the projects themselves. If anyone has any silver bullets, please pass ‘em along…
8 Responses to “You’re In Charge — Now Do It My Way”
I’d say a one lecture introduction to agile development methodologies would do the trick.
If the students had an additional requirement to manage their projects with (lets pick Scrum) I think that actually using the methodology would really pay off.
With quick sprints of 2 weeks the students would quickly get a grasp of where they stand.
You could also make a requirement that they hand in their burn-down charts with the final code.
May not be the silver bullet, but it’s been working for us for some time.
Jamie
By Jamie McQuay on Feb 17, 2008
I don’t have a silver bullet, just an untested suggestion.
How about having the students enter some “billable hours” on a website, as they work on their project.
If they work as consultant, they will need to keep track of such to gain experience and make reasonable time estimates.
By André Roberge on Feb 17, 2008
They’re all familiar with agile methods, but that doesn’t help when you’re juggling several sets of demands — the timeslicing would make classic agile sprints (and most other classical time/project management strategies) difficult even for experienced professionals.
By Greg Wilson on Feb 17, 2008
I think the regular demos do a good job of encouraging us to work. Of course for some groups these aren’t a problem, because they’ve got demoable software from the get go. But for those of us (ahem) that have only specs and ideas to go on, doing a live let’s-see-what-you’ve-got demo is stressful enough that this course does not get pushed aside.
I’m not sure if you mean written progress reports. If you do, then I would suggest doing informal spoken ones instead, one-on-one with the teams. These wouldn’t take long and wouldn’t require much preparation, but would probably encourage the teams to evaluate their progress in the course. On the downside, students may not be completely honest about their progress and continue to focus elsewhere, but you can’t force them to care.
By Dmitri on Feb 17, 2008
I am a student and in my experience projects either get pushed to the side or take up 90% of my free (and usable) time. Two days a week are “allocated” to me working on my master’s thesis but I frequently spend a lot more time on it, in the process pushing aside other (at the time boring) work.
My impression from working with “real” academics is that all of them are involved in more than two projects/experiments at a time plus lecturing. So how do you/they manage their time? Maybe some of those ideas can be used by students who need to juggle five or so “projects” at a time.
By Tim Head on Feb 18, 2008
Instead of setting deadlines for them, why not get them to set their own deadlines at the start of the course? And perhaps instead of regular progress reports, maybe you could get them to submit a report whenever they have accomplished a major task, whether it was met on their self-appointed “deadline” or not (if not, maybe one of the required questions on the report could be something like “What are some of the factors that led to this task not being completed on time?”) This way, they could both set their own pace and take responsibility for it. IMO it feels better too, bringing someone up to date because you want to, not because you have to.
By Yi Qing Sim on Feb 18, 2008
I think back to my most rewarding group project in college. The biggest motivation to work hard was to not let down the members of my team. They all seemed to be working so hard, so I had to do the same to pull my weight.
At the end of the course, we discussed it and it turned out everyone else felt the same way and so all four of us were working hard every week so we wouldn’t come off as the slacker of the team.
So I would suggest focusing the students’ attention on how their work impacts their teammates progress. Arrange dependencies so that one person has to finish their work early in the sprint to hand it off to a teammate.
Then in the next sprint, reverse their roles, so no one gets stuck on either end of the dependency every time.
Of course this leaves each student with some free time either at the early part or the late part of the sprint, which is fine because they have other classes and responsibilities too.
By Bill Karwin on Feb 18, 2008
In the mining industry, a market segment typically far behind the technology curve, we have a surprisingly simple method of checking project progress. Every few days, a company bigwig (be it president, VP, or manager) strolls by and asks how things are coming along.
They don’t delve into technical details nor do they appreciate the finer development concerns that are being addressed. They want, essentially, a few screenshots showing that the deliverable/front end/what-have-you is improving. Younger managers tend to look for a new, cool, business rule being matched; older ones prefer user interface improvements.
To apply this to your students’ projects, you might want to collect functionality screenshots at a set interval–two weeks matches up with Agile fairly well. At the end of a project, the screenshots are reviewed as a set to see how likely these glimpses of functionality would have satisfied the average business user. Weight to motivate!
By Ian on Feb 21, 2008