Involving stakeholders in CDIO projects

The Technical University of Denmark has implemented the CDIO standards and principles in all of its B.Eng. courses since 2008. In order to increase innovative skills and to educate engineers who are capable of directly fulfilling the needs of Danish industry, the curricula of the B.Eng. Software Technology (SWT) and B.Eng.

IT and Economics (ITOE) have recently been revised (Nyborg et. al. 2015). This revision has focused upon combing the best of the existing educations which are rooted in a practice oriented development environment and by strengthening the involvement of stakeholders in general. The involvement of stakeholders is a central tenet in the implementation of the CDIO framework and can be challenging to accomplish.

This is even more pronounced when considering external stakeholders. We present a roadmap that shows how external stakeholders can be successfully involved in undergraduate courses. Already from the beginning of the 2nd year studies, students and stakeholders are engaged in significant collaboration on real world projects.

The project ideas are proposed by external stakeholders and come from the field of mobile application development. The product development process has been designed and developed to closely reflect the processes and challenges that the students will meet when employed in industry after graduation. This process includes the challenges and uncertainties that occur in real life with real customers and stakeholders.

The courses involved are compulsory courses which are offered annually on the third semester. The courses have now been held three times and after each completion the process and content have been evaluated and refined in accordance with the feedback received from the students and stakeholders involved.

The involvement of stakeholders from the very beginning of the projects provides an environment for real world development processes including requirements elicitation and design build experiences utilizing industry standard tools and cutting-edge technologies. This approach achieves the involvement of external stakeholders within the full CDIO framework, clearly establishing CDIO as the context for engineering education (CDIO Standard 1).

We encourage engineering educational institutions to implement the roadmap as a way of involving stakeholders within the CDIO framework. This article will present details and important considerations on each step of the roadmap as well as findings and insights gained.