Bringing Agility to the Classroom: Integrating Professional Scrum Trainings to an Undergraduate IT Project Management Course

This Innovative Practice Full Paper examines the integration of Professional Scrum Trainings (PST) into an undergraduate class. The PST was integrated into the IT project management course in 2016. The course deals with challenges in IT projects, agile project management, intercultural project teams and IT project controlling. It is held in the Bachelor of Science programs Business Information Systems and Electronic Government, which is provided by the department of business computing at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts -Hochschule Hannover in Germany. We integrate PSTs into the course with the aim to provide the opportunity to our students of a deep dive into the most commonly used agile method Scrum. Also, we collaborated with visiting lecturers from the industry mainly to include practice-relevant problems, challenges, and examples to the students. We prepared, planned, and performed the integration of the PST since 2016 in every term, except the summer term in 2020 due to Covid-19 reasons. This paper presents our approach to integrate PSTs as Scrum seminars into an undergraduate course in higher education. We also analyzed how the students value the integration of PSTs into the IT project management course. Based on our experience and learnings including the quantitative evaluation data, which we conduct regularly, we describe that the students value attending a PST in their studies and benefit from specific experiences related to Scrum in practice. The results include both, classroom and virtual distance teaching during Covid-19. Furthermore, we give three recommendations for other lecturers, which are interested integrating PSTs into their teaching activities. The recommendations refer to the collaboration with professionals from practice, the importance of providing practical relevant knowledge to the students and the possibility of integrating certification providers to the integrated PST. Thus, the paper contributes to an understanding how to integrate agile methods and professional trainings into a higher education context both in the classroom and virtual distance teaching environments.