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The Coach’s Guide: Best Practices for Faculty-mentored Multidisciplinary Product Design Teams

Abstract

Faculty mentors, also known as coaches, have two overarching roles when mentoring industrially sponsored capstone design projects: (1) ensure the team achieves the academic goals of the course, and (2) keep the team focused on the design project goals.

The Integrated Product and Process Design (IPPD) program at the University of Florida is a fully institutionalized experiential educational course sequence. Through weekly classes held over two semesters (eight months), students from various engineering and business disciplines are taught how to design products and processes. Then working in small multidisciplinary teams the students design and build authentic industrial products under the guidance of faculty coaches and industrial liaison engineers representing the sponsoring companies.

Over a fourteen-year period, spanning more than 340 industry-sponsored design projects, a wide variety of interaction patterns have been observed between project teams and their coaches. With help from the best faculty coaches, and guidance from published literature on team dynamics and “coaching for success,” a “how-to” guide was developed as a resource for faculty project coaches. This guide includes elements such as an overview of the IPPD program, roles and responsibilities for various stakeholders, a collection of best practices for mentoring and conflict management, and a frequently-asked-questions section. Since the IPPD program is multidisciplinary, an appendix with a set of expectations for each participating undergraduate discipline was developed.

The IPPD Coach Guide is intended to be a framework for capturing and sharing with the capstone design community a set of best practices for team mentoring.

Introduction

The Integrated Product and Process Design (IPPD) program1-4 is an innovative educational initiative at the College of Engineering of the University of Florida. In weekly classes spanning two consecutive academic semesters, (eight months), students from various engineering and business disciplines are taught how to design products and processes. Then, working in small multidisciplinary teams under the guidance of faculty coaches and industrial liaison engineers, the students design and build an industrial product or design a manufacturing process to specifications established in collaboration with the sponsoring company.

The IPPD program is institutionalized at the University of Florida and since its launch in 1995, over 340 industry-sponsored multidisciplinary projects have been completed, with the participation of more than 1900 students and 50 faculty coaches, and hundreds of company sponsor liaison engineers. While the IPPD development process is well defined and 90% of the projects are deemed successful, there is wide variability in the patterns of the interactions between the faculty coaches and their student teams.

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Stanfill, R. K., & Mohsin, A., & Crisalle, O., & Tufekci, S., & Crane, C. (2010, June), The Coach's Guide: Best Practices For Faculty Mentored Multidisciplinary Product Design Teams Paper presented at 2010 Annual Conference & Exposition, Louisville, Kentucky. 10.18260/1-2--16852