REINVENTING UNIVERSITIES: AGILE PROJECT MANAGEMENT IN HIGHER EDUCATION

Abstract

Universities worldwide are facing similar problems, decrease in public funding, increase of international competition and slow bureaucratic organization. One of the possibilities to increase flexibility and to respond better to students’ needs and job market changes is implementing Agile Project Management practices. Both Agile and its most popular Scrum methodology have origins in Software development but have been successfully adopted in other industries as well. This paper examined specific Agile Project Management practices that can be implemented in different areas of Universities, such as Governance and Structure, Curriculum Design, Teaching, Learning, Evaluation, Online Courses and Virtual Classroom. It is concluded that Universities could foster benefits by implementing Agile practices partly, incrementally or by having a full Agile transformation, but either way a goodwill to test it and internal champions to lead the change represent crucial elements of such transformation.