Castles and dreams… or robots?
Hands-on experience is an important part of education for every student who considers developing career in the project management discipline. We organized two practical seminars for students as an integral part of the project management teachings. The first workshop concentrates on building castles using the traditional project management methods while the second one focuses on constructing robots according to the ideas of agile project management. We connected both hands-on seminars to our research based on Profile of mood states (POMS) psychological method. Therefore, we asked the students to fill in two short questionnaires on each hands-on workshop. The hands-on seminars involved 4 study groups. All study groups consisted of 95 author’s students that formed 18 teams.
Project management
Project management is application of specific processes and principles to initiate, plan, execute and manage the way that new initiatives or changes are implemented within an organization. (AXELOS, 2017) Project management can be also viewed as a change management process where organizations and individuals use limited resources to implement projects. Project is a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service, or result. Project teams achieve the outcomes using multiple techniques, such as traditional (or predictive) project management and agile (or adaptive) project management. (Project Management Institute, 2023)
Traditional project management
Traditional project management focuses on planning ahead and a carefully prepared project plan. Each project plan includes several project phases. Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) divides projects into five subsequent phases: initiating, planning, executing, monitoring and controlling, and closing the project. (Project Management Institute, 2023) Traditional approaches to project management work well on projects with concrete and visible goal, such as construction and building projects. As a first part of the hands-on project management experience, students attempted to build medieval castles.
Building the castles
Our first hands-on seminar focused on practical application of traditional project management. The general objective was to build a medieval castle for the Czech king. This task required building a simplified castle model using paper and tools such as scissors, glue, wooden skewers and crayons. We posed several requirements for the castles.
We defined three functional requirements as follows:
- A residential palace.
- (At least) two towers.
- Defensive walls with battlements and loopholes for archers.
We also specified two non-functional requirements:
- The castle should be indomitable and withstand a siege.
- The castle should be representative and appeal to the king.
The students worked in small teams. In the first part of the workshop, each team appointed a project manager and put together a detailed project plan. The project plan included all tasks necessary for completing the castle, including task estimates. We allowed the students to start building only after they had prepared a complete project plan for the castle.
The project manager held responsibility for following the project plan and measured the time spent on each task. Planning took approximately 15 minutes for an average team, while building scored around 60 minutes. The remaining workshop time was dedicated to presenting the castles to colleagues and filling up the questionnaires for our research. The students have built many interesting castles. See figure 1 for a selection of castles built by the students. One castle was dedicated to a famous Czech moderator and singer, another one was inspired by the Prague Castle and former president of the Czech Republic and so on.
Agile project management
Agile project management is a different approach to managing projects that emerged as response to the software development crisis in the 90s. (Shore et al., 2022) Agile project management concentrates on iterative development in short cycles, embraces the change and fast feedback from the customer. Manifesto for Agile Software Development (2001) declares basic values and principles of agile software development as agreed by the group of professionals in the field of software engineering. Agile approaches to managing projects shine on innovative and software projects. According to the 16th State of Agile Report (2022), the most popular agile framework is Scrum.
Scrum
Scrum is a project development method and framework designated to develop complex systems in dynamically changing environments. Scrum is highly flexible and adaptive method, ideal for delivering innovations and prototyping new solutions. As the co-author of Scrum Jeff Sutherland (2014) points out, Scrum is heavily influenced by preceding methodologies employed in manufacturing, most notably Lean production and Toyota Production System (Liker & Ross, 2017). Scrum defines fixed-time iterations (sprints), team roles, ceremonies and artifacts. As a second part of the hands-on project management experience, students tried building robots using a simplified Scrum method.
Constructing the robots
Similarly to the first seminar, our second hands-on seminar focused on practical use of agile project management. The objective of the second seminar was to build a robot that represents the state of “mind and heart” of the young Generation Z using LEGO (2023) components. We presented the students a robot from “Bridge between generations” event (Most mezi generacemi, 2023) as inspiration for their projects.
We have not given the students detailed requirements to encourage spontaneous ideas, creativity and innovation as these are feats essential for agile development. The students worked in the same small teams as in the previous workshop. In the first part of the workshop, each team elected a Scrum master and a product owner and assembled an initial product backlog. The product backlog included user stories with diverse ideas and tasks eligible for building the robot. The team estimated each user story utilizing story points.
We used a simplified version of Scrum due to limited time for the seminars. Each sprint took 10 minutes (most teams managed to undertake four sprints during the workshop). We also merged the Scrum ceremonies into one session between each of the sprints. This session included review, retrospective, daily scrum and planning. See figure 2 for a sample robot constructed by the students.
Unlike the fixed project plan for building castles, students regularly added new user stories to the product backlog during the project development. These user stories directly addressed issues, difficulties and creative ideas that emerged during the robot building activities. In the beginning and in the end of the workshop, the students filled in questionnaires for our research, equally to the first seminar.
Profile of mood states
Profile of mood states is a psychological method and rating scale for measuring changes in mood states. McNair et al. (1971) developed this method to quickly evaluate changes in mood states over a period of time. The participants fill in a simple questionnaire before and after the assessed activity using a 5-point numerical scale for each mood state. The original version of the questionnaire includes 65 questions and six aggregated dimensions of mood states. (McNair et al., 1971) For the hands-on project management seminars, we used a shortened Czech version of the test as proposed by Stuchlíková and Man (2005). The authors custom-tailored and attested this version of the questionnaire especially for Czech audiences. This shortened version contains 37 questions.
Our research focuses on observing and assessing shifts in students’ mood states before and after building the castles (and robots) and between traditional and agile project management approaches. As we measured changes in mood states before and after building activities, the students filled in the questionnaires in the beginning and in the end of the related seminar. We published each questionnaire only for a limited amount of time that matched given seminar and student group to prevent “filling the wrong form” errors. We will process collected data from the questionnaires in January 2024 and publish the results later that year.
To conclude the article, we successfully managed to organize two hands-on project management seminars for students and gathered data for further research related to changes in mood states of participants.
References
- 16th State of Agile Report. (2022). https://digital.ai/resource-center/analyst-reports/state-of-agile-report/
- AXELOS. (2017). Managing successful projects with PRINCE2 (6th edition). The Stationery Office.
- LEGO. (2023). https://www.lego.com/en-us
- Liker, J. K., & Ross, K. (2017). The Toyota way to service excellence: Lean transformation in service organizations. McGraw-Hill Education.
- Manifesto for agile software development. (2001). http://agilemanifesto.org/
- McNair, D.M., Lorr, M., & Droppleman, L.F. (1971). Manual for the Profile of Mood States.
- Most mezi generacemi. (2023). https://jobs.pef.czu.cz/most
- Project Management Institute. (2023). Project Management Institute | PMI. https://www.pmi.org/
- Shore, J., Larsen, D., Klitgaard, G., & Warden, S. (2022). The art of agile development (Second edition). O’Reilly Media.
- Stuchlíková, I., & Man, F. (2005). Dotazník k měření afektivních stavů: Konfirmační faktorová analýza krátké české verze. Československá psychologie.
- Sutherland, J. (2014). Scrum: The art of doing twice the work in half the time. Currency.
