Authors: Emily Larsen, Darin Aaby, Chuck Pezeshki
Many capstone programs involve outside stakeholders as project sponsors, but improvements can be made by understanding student growth transitions and how professionals can assist. Washington State University explored tools for assessing and enhancing the skills of professionals who mentor capstone teams. This guide helps capstone instructors coach clients to unlock student development opportunities.
Steps to Coaching the Client
- Pre-Project Scoping: Meet face-to-face with the client to establish effective communication and a meaningful relationship before project initiation. Tour the client’s facility to understand the project and deliverables, and convey the abilities of the student cohort.
- Assess Client’s v-Meme Structure: Understand the client’s v-Meme structure to advise them on assisting students in transitioning from passive, Authoritarian relationships to productive, goal-based interactions. Authoritarian clients may slip into the vacuum left by the supervising professor.
- Preliminary Design Review (PDR): The well-coached client will bring together a large group of stakeholders on his/her end. Hopefully, some of these will also be practicing engineers that can act as silent advocates for the students.
- Encourage Client Communication: Encourage the client to communicate with students before the PDR about trade-offs and balancing in the specifications. Clients, by making explicit their desires, can compensate for preconceived and arbitrary student biases that are often the result of inexperience.
- Final Design Review: By having the client treat the students with a group identity, now the client can force-feed students the technical information that likely only the client knows, without disrupting the general momentum of the student team. The authors have observed this phenomenon multiple times, and this type of dynamic creates the highest value-added projects to the customer’s organization.
- Parts Ordering and Acquisition: Clients can leverage their relationships with parts suppliers to expedite material acquisition for the final build. This should be part of the final design review dialogue.