Author: Ed Morrison (Page 2 of 2)

We are using the agile strategy discipline of Strategic Doing to drive re|course forward. The discipline focuses on guiding complex conversations with simple questions.

Normally Strategic Doing workshops lst from 2-3 hours.

But who has time?

Certainly not the faculty, staff an students of ME.

So the Purdue Agile Strategy Lab has come up with a solution: Strategy Sprints. In 30 minutes re|course teams gather to discuss outcomes and pathways, the key components of effective strategy. Led by a trained Strategic Doing guide, the teams clarify an outcome with measurable characteristics and a Pathfinder Project that will move them toward that outcome.

In the course of conducting the Pathfinder, the team is generating data about what might work to improve the interaction of faculty, staff and students in ME.  The Strategy Sprint follows the basic structure. of Strategic Doing.

We are starting the transformation of ME by focusing on key touch points where faculty, students and staff can deepen their interactions.  coming out of the faculty retreat in August 2016, we identified some places to start. (You can view a brief report on our faculty retreat here.)

We are building out these teams from a core of faculty members so that they also include students and staff.  You can read more about these teams here.  In brief, here’s where we stand:

1. Lunch with Students:  We are designing a prototype lunch with students around the topic: “Getting a Job”. Learn more here.
2. Undergraduate Research: We are beginning to design a website that would present undergraduates with the research currently being conducted by the faculty. We are in the early stages of designing the wireframe. Learn more here.
3. Tutorial Rooms: This team has had a slow start. We need to improve participation among faculty, staff and students. Learn more here.
4. Community Culture: This team has moved ahead quickly with two Pathfinder Projects. We have several other exciting ideas underway. Learn more here.
5. Faculty Office Hours: we have two Pathfinder Projects underway. The first involves experimenting with relocating faculty office hours to new, more open spaces. The second Pathfinder represents an experiment. A faculty member convenes a gathering of 20 or so students for about an hour. This approach has some promise. Learn more here.

In all of these efforts, we are exploring ways to design “what’s next” for Purdue ME.  if you’re curious, and would like to join us, please do. We are using a new approach designed by the Purdue Agile Strategy Lab, called Strategy Sprints. These workshops are only 30 minutes long and they are guided  with staff from the Agile Strategy Lab.

Map of the re|course teams

During our August faculty retreat, we organized a brief session in which members of the faculty began exploring how to deliver more powerful learning experiences to undergraduate students in Mechanical Engineering. We will move forward with these ideas by forming faculty, student and staff teams. Will begin organizing these teams for launch in the second semester of the 2016 – 2017  school year.

To transform the educational experiences of undergraduates in Mechanical Engineering, we will be using an agile strategy approach that has been incubated at Purdue over the last 10 years. Called Strategic Doing, this approach this strategy was specifically designed for open, loosely connected networks. These are situations in which no one can tell anyone else what to do.

Four years ago, Stanford University and VentureWell, under an NSF contract, turn it to Purdue for help in organizing collaborations within engineering departments at 50 universities across three cohorts.

Over the course of three years, a small Purdue team worked with Stanford and VentureWell to train teams at each of these universities. in the course of six hours over two days, these teams develop strategic action plans designed to transform their undergraduate engineering programs by expanding innovation and entrepreneurship education.

At ASEE in June 2016, the Stanford-VentureWell-Purdue team reported the results of their experiment. You can see the results of their work reported in this paper. Today teams at these 50 universities have generated over 400 collaborations. In the video below, Scott Hutcheson from the Purdue Agile Strategy Lab takes you into the workshop of the last cohort of 25 universities.

Strategic Doing@Pathways from Ed Morrison on Vimeo.

Below