Establishing an Agile Mindset and Culture for Workforce Preparedness: A Baseline Study

This Research Paper presents our work using the Organizational Culture Framework to better understand the educational and operational culture of the Department of Computer Science at Tennessee Tech University. A large percentage of graduates with computing degrees will enter corporate environments dominated by the use of Agile development methods, including Scrum. A significant part of these methodologies is grounded in establishing cultural norms that emphasize teamwork, communication, reflection, and action. We conducted a study using an organizational culture framework to better understand both the ideal and current cultures of our department as well as the levers that can be used to move the current toward the ideal. The design of the study is based on the notion that by identifying an ideal culture and measuring the current culture we can identify the gap between the as-is and the to-be culture of the department. Our results demonstrate a marked difference between the target ideal culture identified by both the Agile experts and faculty/staff and what the students perceive the current culture to be. The results of the survey serve as a baseline for our ongoing effort to create a pathway for transitioning students towards adopting an Agile mindset that will ease the commencement of careers of graduates as practicing software engineers.