The Professional Guide: A Resource for Preparing Capstone Design Students to Function Effectively on Industry-sponsored Project Teams

Completion of a capstone design project typically occurs in the final year of study in U.S. engineering schools. Capstone design projects are often completed by teams of students charged with designing and implementing solutions to real-world problems. Many programs feature projects that are sought from industrial sponsors. These industry-supported projects require that the student teams interact regularly with their off-campus clients. While lectures focus heavily on teaching technical skills, professional skills are often overlooked due to limited classroom time. Providing professional training to senior engineering students will help them work more effectively with their industry sponsors and project team, as well as make them competitive candidates for positions upon graduation. This paper describes a training and reference guide developed for capstone design students at University of Florida (UF) enrolled in the Integrated Product and Process Design (IPPD) Program. The Professional Guide communicates key project research and legal elements, establishes expectations for professional conduct, and defines business procedures that must be followed. Rather than devote classroom time to these topics, the guide and associated training elements essentially constitute a self-paced new-hire professional orientation program for capstone design students. Experience at UF suggests that the Professional Guide provides an efficient vehicle for delivering important training that might otherwise be neglected. The Professional Guide’s project research and legal elements cover essential intellectual property, non-disclosure, and export controls aspects. The expectations for professional conduct areas covered include sexual harassment prevention, identification of at-risk students, basic laboratory safety, and over two dozen ethics mini-case studies developed from real IPPD experiences. Items lumped into the business procedures include training for the IPPD collaboration and project management tools, lab and classroom rules, effective meeting strategies, and procedures for purchasing and travel. Many of the training elements require creation of web-based elements for students to prove they have mastered the materials. Students also receive certificates for the Preventing Sexual Harassment and At-Risk Student training courses. As an incentive to complete the required training, each team’s laboratory access is withheld until all team members complete the assignments. Introduction The Integrated Product and Process Design (IPPD) Program is an innovative educational initiative at the College of Engineering of the University of Florida (UF). In weekly classes spanning two consecutive academic semesters, (eight months), students from various engineering and business disciplines are taught how to design products and processes. Then, working in small multidisciplinary teams under the guidance of faculty coaches and industrial liaison engineers, the students design and build an industrial product or design a manufacturing process to specifications established in collaboration with the sponsoring company. IPPD is institutionalized at UF and since its launch in 1995, over 400 industry-sponsored multidisciplinary projects have been completed, with the participation of more than 2,000 students and 50 faculty coaches, and hundreds of company sponsor liaison engineers. IPPD was designed from day one to be an outstanding experiential education program that would span the classroom, laboratory and industrial workplace. The educational goals include learning how to: • design, build and test a real product following industry best practices • function in a multidisciplinary team • complete projects on time and within budget While the IPPD Program’s development process is well defined and 90% of the projects are deemed successful, there is wide variability in the patterns of the interactions between the faculty coaches, their student teams, industry liaisons, and IPPD staff. Each year brings new projects, new students, and many new challenges (logistical, managerial, technical, and financial) for the IPPD stakeholders to deal with. A series of guides have been developed by IPPD to improve the outcomes for each of the stakeholders. A project coaching guide was developed to aid faculty project mentors in managing student teams. For liaison engineers, a guide was developed to provide tips for successful interactions with the student teams. A training manual was developed in year one of the IPPD Program to define required project technical deliverables and technical expectations for the student teams. The scope of the training manual has been updated annually to include new process elements, such as the incorporation of software development deliverables, and clarifying earlier content, such as the proper organization of a project risk summary table. The training manual originally included content describing financial and travel procedures. The procedures predated UF’s adoption of the PeopleSoft Enterprise Resource Management (ERM) system. As the ERM system was rolled out over many years, UF financial, fiscal, travel, grant, human resources, and other core business processes were completely reengineered. Further, the new ERM-enabled business processes were accompanied by increased level of compliance by all stakeholders to consistent practices. As a consequence, the IPPD financial and travel procedures were removed from the training manual and replaced with a series of how-to presentations delivered during IPPD class time. Since its inception in 1995, the IPPD Program has always included a lecture component. The lectures traditionally only focused on technical topics relevant to product development. Feedback gathered from sponsoring companies and faculty mentors indicated there were weaknesses in student team project management, effective meetings, and presentation skills. Industry-led seminars were incorporated to address shortcomings in these so-called “soft” skill/professionalism areas. While the liaison engineer and faculty coach guides captured lessons learned discovered over the years for effectively interacting with the student project teams, it was incumbent upon these mentors to pass along this knowledge to the students. As an example, the coach guide devotes a section to dealing with difficult students and problem teams. The guide defines a process to terminate problem students that do not respond to a series of defined intervention steps. Other than an overview of this termination process in the course syllabus, there was no training or reference guide provided to the students defining acceptable team behaviors, how to resolve conflicts, or who to go to seek help in resolving team problems. A new how-to reference, IPPD Professional Guide, was created as a result of the following circumstances occurring in the Fall of 2011: • the class meeting structure was changed from 3 one-hour meetings a week to one 3-hour meeting a week • additional active learning opportunities were incorporated into class time to reinforce core IPPD technical elements • the number of lectures were reduced, as were the length of the lectures With less class time available, it was determined that certain technical and professional learning activities would have to be accomplished outside of regular class time. Further, through observation of student engagement during lectures, feedback on various course management surveys, and usage patterns of various web-based collaboration and document management tools, it was found that delivering certain professionalism training content in class lectures was ineffective. Inevitably, each team had already appointed certain team members to specific tasks (one member responsible for purchasing, one for travel, one for managing the team wiki, and so forth), resulting in other team members not paying attention to process details during class. Moreover, students were not taking ownership of their participation in the overall project scope (“that’s not my job, I’m an _______ engineer”). As a result, teams were hindered when, for instance, they needed to submit a travel request, but their designated travel team member was not available to show the others how. A key outcome designed into the IPPD Program is for students to develop capabilities outside of their discipline boundaries to support their professional skills and engineering technical skills. The IPPD Professional Guide was developed to address professional, non-technical elements needed by all project teams for successful project outcomes. This paper will discuss the motivation behind creating the Professional Guide, the development process used to create the Guide, key elements and features, and current limitations and improvements planned. Motivation The IPPD Advisory Board strongly endorsed the concept of creating guides for the stakeholders in the program. This endorsement grew out of concern for improving the overall effectiveness of the IPPD Program in meeting educational goals and for maintaining long-lasting relationships with sponsoring companies. Students have always been a central stakeholder, yet no professional practice guide had ever been provided as a reference for effective interactions with IPPD. A guide was needed to span the IPPD interactions inside and outside the classroom, such as Loui notes in student reflections, a student “would be a professional “both on and off the clock” because being a professional is integral to a person’s identity”. Streamline procedural, professional, and legal information into one document Previously, many elements of IPPD were being delivered to students through lectures scattered throughout the academic year. This caused problems because students needed to know certain information (such as how to do update the team Trac Wiki) several weeks before it was taught in a lecture, but due to a large amount of material that needed to b