Trusting in agile processes in agile design education
Learnings from a sprint task in quick Project Management research related topics.
As a small preface let me just state that this text was initially written aiming to share my learning after a sprint task of 40min.
But to be honest, I’ve rewritten it so many times, it took so many distinct directions that I feel it has become more of a self-reflection exercise on its own.
Almost one month after starting my MA — Digital Experience Design (DXD), I don’t feel like I know what I am doing, but I was never so sure in my life that I’m doing the right thing. This text is just an attempt to show you why I have to keep doing whatever I’m doing…
Walking the Talk. Talking the Walk.
A couple of weeks back, at Hyper Island, Manchester, we had a brief crash course on how to use the Teesside University online library, presented by Karoline Andersson — an alumna of the MA in Digital Media Management (DMM — Crew 6). It was especially crafted for the academic requirements of the MA programmes in both DMM (Crew 7) and DXD (Crew 2).
Personally, I felt it has ignited some ideas, which might bear fruit in the future.
In order to get acquainted with the navigation and features that are available on the Teesside online library, we had to do research on “Project Management”.
The moment Karoline told us which topic would we be researched, inside my mind, a battle of contrasting thoughts started:
Research on Project Management? Here’s something I DO like to read about!
…or:
Research on Project Management? Here’s something I have read about too much and actually developed too less…
I have done more than a handful of lectures while teaching a Project Management subject, for both undergraduate (Raffles Mumbai, India) and postgraduate design programmes (ESAD College of Art and Design — Matosinhos, Portugal). However, the knowledge shared with my former students was almost entirely academic, and this harassed my thoughts in a discouraging way:
But does my WALK matches my TALK when it comes to Project Management in the digital industry setting?
It’s true that in the recent past, while working as a lecturer, I had the chance to manage teams and projects more than a couple of times. Even if this experience wasn’t exclusively of a project manager, many times I would find myself developing creative work within those teams, plus teaching full-time.
Nonetheless, on one hand, I humbly want to believe that the outcome of these projects — here is one and here another— and their apparent suitability for its audience are evidence of my competencies, as both creative and project manager. But, on the other hand, we all know how unreliable it is guessing how thorough the processes behind a given outcome, if we just take in consideration the outcome itself. So the aesthetic layer of this outcome proves very little on the above mentioned competencies.
Do you sense any contradiction here? Can the outcome itself give away enough to assess the quality of development processes? Maybe… What I personally believe is that solid processes usually translate into high quality outcomes (or results).
Practice can only make perfect
This kind of chicken and egg situation, reminds me the Paradox of Process in Agile Software Development. Which might be considered a primitive reference about agile development (circa 2004), but still offers remarkable aphorisms:
If you don’t use your process it can’t help you; if your process doesn’t help, you won’t use it.
… or:
The obvious consequence of the paradox of process is that when you begin a new process it seems totally useless and a waste of time. You need to have faith and really use the process until it begins to return on your investment.
… or even:
Many of the rules and (…) processes seem like a waste of time when you start them. It takes time and patience to get to a point where they begin to help you in unexpected ways.
My past experience with project management was never entirely agile. Instead it was a vibrant blend between autocracy, waterfall, agile and anarchy. A couple of things were sure though: projects were always finalised, sooner or later; and each member of the team knew what they needed to do in order to complete the project. Isn’t this last statement an evidence of Good Management? But what about Great Management? That type of management in which each member of the team knows what the organisation needs to do.
Well I guess there’s no need to elaborate that we are living times where being good at doing something is simply not good enough, unless you know how to put it into words — see here how Julie Zhuo does it .
Learning to trust the process
There is a lot of focus on the process at Hyper Island programmes. “Trust the process” is like a mantra here.
I’m glad that by joining this MA I entered in a place where values like “a better design education” are not marketing sale lines. Not that design education in the UK is lagging behind. On the contrary, I’m in a country that according to Design Council UK “the latest government statistics, the sector grew 10.8% each year from 2008–2013; compared to 4.2% for the rest of the economy”, which is a rather substantial growth. At Hyper Island, the programme leaders are well aware of this fact and they use this competitive advantage to build on solid education offer. For instance, in 2015 the first DXD batch — Crew 1 — , had the chance to meet 24 industry leading figures, during their MA, which is a thorough approach to ensure industry and education are working together to stay ahead.
Postface
I will get back to the topic of the previous paragraph in a forthcoming post.
What I need to do now, is to share with you some insights about the original task, the one that motivated all this reflection yet too scattered at least for the time being.
So, when I was searching in Teesside's web for the intersection between “agile frameworks” + “education” , there was a particular paper. Its title was rather appealing and immediately caught my attention: An Agile method for Teaching and Learning, a research work for the University of Hertfordshire, by Marija Cubric an expert in Wiki, e-Learning and Agile Business Development.
Out of my own learnings from this paper I could highlight the following:
The studies included in the review reported high student satisfaction and enthusiasm with regards to core agile practices, and their positive impact on employability and development of professional skills required by industry.
The findings reported here indicate a high level of student satisfaction with the implementation of the agile L&T (Learning & Teaching) method as well as the impact it had on their own learning. Students’ high engagement with the wiki-based activities had positive impact on their performance, but the type of wiki interactions most frequently practiced implied mostly quantitative cognitive gains and less so, qualitative increase in knowledge.
Although I did not explore this topic as much as I would like to yet, I was able to find more than a handful of interesting eye-opening facts in this article. Bottom line, this paper could be of interest to educators who would like to teach agile development in higher education settings, or even a broader scope of academics who plan to apply any agile framework — like Scrum — in their own teaching practice.
Some utterly interesting results are as follow:
How students were affected on improvements of specific skills
- 94.12% improve knowledge of the subject;
- 82.35% improve teamwork skills;
- 76.47% improve time-management skills;
- 76.47% improve negotiation skills;
- 67.35% become more confident in face-to-face communication;
- 67.35% improve writing skills;
To what extent have the following factors helped in achieving “cohesion” in your group
- 94.12% regular tutor’s feedback;
- 76.47% frequent communication amongst group members;
- 67.65% clear objectives of the group assignment;
- 64.71% frequent and incremental delivery of group work;
I believe if a similar study using my colleagues of DMM and DXD as sample would have identical results.
The behavioural change, that after only one month, both my colleagues and myself, must be due to the whole set of tools and methodologies put in place by Hyper Island team of facilitators.
But I wonder if the staff at Hyper Island knows that they are, consciously or unconsciously, teaching agile methods also in a agile way. I would bet they do!
References
An Agile method for Teaching and Learning
Cubric, M. 2013, “An agile method for teaching agile in business schools”, International Journal of Management Education, vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 119–131
