By : Franyi Sarmiento, Ph.D., Inspenet, June 6, 2022
Students at Universidad San Sebastián in Chile are trained in a leading technique in markets and industries: the Scrum methodology, which makes it easier to carry out flexible projects that meet the expectations of companies, connecting them with the latest trends in the world of work.
Training engineers these days is very different than it was a few years ago. The demand for a structured but flexible performance in the process of executing a project has been changing and the Universidad San Sebastián (USS) has understood this, so it has not hesitated to implement tools that help students to improve. their insertion into the world of work and prepare them to adapt to all the changes that will continue to occur.
This is confirmed by Cristián Valdés, director of the industrial civil engineering career of this house of studies: “This generation learns differently and has forced us to rethink the way we teach and how we prepare our students to go out into the strengthened world of work, which is also different from the one in which we started working”.
One way to do this has been through the implementation of a pilot plan of the Scrum Methodology. It is a project management system that ensures that the team involved in its development knows its tasks and deadlines. And most importantly, help them meet the goals.
The idea is to implement it in students from the first year to maintain order in the projects and familiarize them with different ways of working as a team.
What is it about and why its success when facing projects?
-It is a very structured methodology -says Federico Casanello, dean of the Faculty of Engineering, Architecture and Design of the USS-, which allows projects not only to be efficient in the process, but also to be flexible; that is to say, adaptable to the changes that the client or the company can make during its execution”.
For these two things to be true, the methodology works as follows:
1.- The participants and their respective roles are defined. The first is the product owner, who is the one who transmits the objectives and requirements of the project.
2.- The second is the scrum master, who leads the project and guides all those involved to comply with the provisions;
3.- Third, there are the members of the scrum team, who are the ones who execute what they previously scheduled on a daily basis to meet the project objective.
Casanello explains that “the project based on Scrum is divided into different deliveries, called sprints, which normally last two weeks. It begins with a planning meeting, where responsibilities are distributed”.
Valdés complements, “after that, daily, they meet with the scrum master, and on a visual board they present their committed progress. They are very short meetings, lasting 10 or 15 minutes, where there is no accountability for what you were able to do or not, or why, rather it is very practical in determining progress. In fact, it’s called a “walking meeting” (no sitting allowed).”
Once the work periods or sprints have concluded, a more extensive review is carried out and progress is questioned in order to evaluate performance and make continuous improvements in the process.
It is what is called, the retrospective analysis of the work, where many doubts are solved, such as what can be improved or what was done wrong so as not to repeat it in the next sprint. Daily monitoring allows flexibility, so important in projects, and makes progress more efficient, since it can take different directions in the process, not at the end of the project.
But this is not the sole objective of the scrum methodology for the USS, since one of its great strengths is the formation and optimal functioning of the work teams.
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