This study's setting is the experiential learning projects of four courses with business process management content at the University of Cape Town's information systems department. The University of Cape Town is the oldest South African University and top-ranked of the 26 public universities in South Africa regarding academic staff input, undergraduate to masters throughput and a high level of knowledge output (UCT, 2020). Founded in 1829 as a high school for boys, the University of Cape Town developed into a fully-fledged university after 1880, aided by funding from private sources and the government and increased demand for diamond and gold mining skills. The University of Cape Town was formally established as a university in 1918. With over 80 specialist research units, the University of Cape Town has more than a third of South Africa's A-rated researchers who have taught and supervised over 100 000 alumni (UCT, 2020). The Information Systems Department is attached to the Commerce Faculty, one of six faculties at the university. The other faculties are Engineering
& the Built Environment, Law, Health Sciences, Humanities and Science.
The University of Cape Town courses were selected as the research setting because these courses are at the highest immersion level of integrated practicum according to the classification of Guthrie and Guthrie (2000). At the time of this study, none of the other top five South African Universities offers a course at the same level of immersion (Flügel et al., 2014). The integrated practicum was based on a project that simulates enterprise system software in a live industry situation and instruction in theory with hands-on experience of an enterprise system.
102 3.3.1 Information Systems Courses Setting
The courses had similar content for enterprise systems and business process management at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. The current study's focus was restricted to the business process management aspects and the experiential learning project. However, there was a significant crossover between the enterprise systems content and the business process management content.
Both undergraduate and postgraduate courses aimed to teach the application and integration of enterprise systems and business process management principles. The undergraduate courses introduced students to enterprise systems and business process management technologies that impact companies’ business practices. The postgraduate course aimed to prepare students for specific roles, such as business process practitioners, enterprise system business analysts, enterprise systems managers, and systems integrators. All courses included a business process management experiential learning project which provided the research data for this thesis.
The courses included coursework, half-term tests, summative assessment exams, and the business process experiential learning projects. The undergraduate courses were group projects, and the postgraduate projects were undertaken individually. The coursework included business architecture, enterprise systems, strategic information technology management and business process management. The course convener, assistant lecturers and guest lecturers, supported by a team of tutors, conducted the lectures, in-class exercises, and assignments. Presentation slides, in-class task requirements, the course readers, assignments, additional resources and the project brief were uploaded to a hosted learning management system to which each student, lecturer and tutor had access. Feedback on tasks, projects and exams were provided to the students on the learning management system, which had several options for notifying students of updates to the course.
In preparation for the courses' business process aspects, an 80-page business process management reader was provided to the students for a background to the courses and the projects. The course readers summarised the literature on business processes related to business process management, future trends, business process modelling, business process redesign, measuring business process effectivity, business process improvement, standards,
103 governance and roles, and compliance and risk management. The readers included business process management systems and introductions to cloud computing, open-source software, and applying systems development and information technology operations (commonly referred to as DevOps) to business process management systems.
As part of the experiential learning projects, students were tasked with presenting their projects. An international consulting firm oversaw the projects and presented awards to the top three project teams for the undergraduate courses.
3.3.2 Business Process Management Experiential Learning Project
Except for the final assessment exam, the business process experiential learning project was the most significant deliverable from each course. Students were supplied with a 19-page project specification document (Appendix G). The projects required students to prepare a business process scoping, business case, analysis and design document following the BPTrends Methodology (Harmon, 2019). Students selected an existing business process in an operational enterprise and had to interview relevant stakeholders. The resulting analysis and design were based on the process steps determined from the stakeholder interviews and not espoused process steps from company records. The undergraduate groups were provided with a choice of companies that actively used enterprise systems and agreed to allow the groups to redesign an existing process. The postgraduate course students were required to source their own companies for their projects.
A typical project timeline for the projects was:
• 17th August – Form Groups & Select processes
• 1st September - 16th October – Facilitator Evaluation [2%]
• 21st and 22nd September – Presentation [3.5%]
• 30th October 12pm - Documentation Hand-in [12.5%]
• 8th November - Thank & Celebrate
The final project documentation structure was included in the project brief provided to the students and included the number of potential marks per section.
104 The typical requirements for the structure and presentation of the report were:
• Title page and Plagiarism Declaration
• Table of contents
• Introduction [2.5]
• Process Scoping and Stakeholder analysis [10]
• Business Case [5]
• Business Process Analysis [15]
• Business Process Steps [10]
• Suggested Process Redesign [10]
• Process Reporting [16]
• Conclusion [2.5]
• Project Learnings and Group Self-Assessment [9]
• Appendices
The project learnings and self-assessments were the focus of this thesis.