Pearson’s Successmaker

Case: Pearson’s Successmaker: Putting the Customer First in Transforming Product Development Processes, T. S. Raghu and Collin Sellman, The Richard Ivey School of Business (W11744).

Key elements:

Traditional vs. agile software development

Managing and evaluating changes in development methodologies

Relationship between development methodologies and market performance

Submission instructions:

Submit a single document (PDF or MS Word) with answers to the questions below

Number each answer to match the question number

Each question should be answered separately. There may be overlap in some of your answers, but each question is asked from a different angle and needs to be answered individually.

Include at least 5 quality references from reputable sources. Use APA citation formatting, with either footnotes or a reference section at the end of the paper.

Questions:

1.What benefits did Adams-Woodford hope to gain in making the change from traditional waterfall project management to agile project management for the SuccessMaker product?

2.What were the problems with the previous waterfall method used with SuccessMaker?

3.What actions did Adams-Woodford take to prepare the SuccessMaker team for the transition to agile?

4.When the SuccessMaker team encountered problems during Release 3, what actions did Adams-Woodford take to address those problems?

5.Should Adams-Woodford focus on improving agile project management for the SuccessMaker product, or should he start working to expand agile to other product development teams at Pearson? Explain your answer.

6.Within the SuccessMaker team, should Adams-Woodford agree to follow the recommendations from his developers to move from Scrum to Kanban? Why, or why not? What would be the benefits of using Kanban instead of Scrum?