How in sync is the academic world with your industry? Is the next generation of project management and product development directors well versed with the tools of the trade?

As a vendor, we feel it’s important to do our part to support universities and educational institutions that are preparing students to be successful at the next level.

We recently experienced first-hand that in the case of requirements management, the students at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, are ahead of the class.

Graduate students at St. Joseph’s were paired up and assigned an interesting project for their Masters program. They had to understand the latest requirements management tools well enough to deliver a sales presentation and product demo to the rest of the class, and make a compelling case for why the solution they represented was superior. It required them to dig in beyond features and understand customer needs, product positioning, competitive differentiators, pricing and sales strategy.

Brian Brown and Mareme Gueye chose Contour, our Web-based requirements management tool.

They shared with us the materials they put together and we were very impressed with the high-quality work they did. Of course, it didn’t hurt that they wore the Jama “People against Project Failure” rockstar t-shirts for their final presentation.

“Brian & Mareme did a wonderful job on the final assignment I gave the class. I was impressed that Jama showed so much interest in their work. You are the only company that took a personal interest,” said Shelley Weismer, the professor who taught the class.

The future looks bright for the graduating class of 2008. Good luck!

Tags: Company, education, giving back, Industry News & Trends, st. joseph's

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 19th, 2008 at 11:00 am and is filed under Industry News & Trends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.