The Agile Academic Enterprise

Academic enterprises have unique attributes: recurring, months long, instructional terms; “customers” (students) whose short-term dissatisfaction can be part of the path to long-term success; industrial stakeholders who influence program direction and focus to satisfy hiring needs; generation of new knowledge, often with financial support from government agencies and industry; service to the profession and to our institutions. Our five-year project applies the Agile framework Scrum in operations of a medium-sized engineering department at a medium-sized university with an aerospace-aviation niche.