Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University proudly showcases the work of undergraduate honors students by sharing this collection exclusively with the ASU community.
Barrett accepts high performing, academically engaged undergraduate students and works with them in collaboration with all of the other academic units at Arizona State University. All Barrett students complete a thesis or creative project which is an opportunity to explore an intellectual interest and produce an original piece of scholarly research. The thesis or creative project is supervised and defended in front of a faculty committee. Students are able to engage with professors who are nationally recognized in their fields and committed to working with honors students. Completing a Barrett thesis or creative project is an opportunity for undergraduate honors students to contribute to the ASU academic community in a meaningful way.
This project aimed to understand what best practices for leadership in the Information Technology sector and if it could be consolidated for a comprehensive learning plan. This learning plan was housed on a traditional LMS (Canvas) and utilized a combination of IT Management research, interviews conducted with five industry members (all boasting five or more years of work experience), and an analysis of six top institution IT Leadership programs, to create a template. For the provided questionnaires, participants were asked to consider their time in the industry and discuss work culture dynamics, distribution of power, and what pain points were felt in their daily operations. All participants also described their direct roles and seniority, ranging from self-described “middle” to ”high” level placements. Based on these interviews, much of what seems to halt productivity and employee satisfaction regularly comes from a lack of concise and regular communication and a need for more understanding regarding team members' drive or capabilities. Regarding the program evaluation, six IT Leadership programs were chosen, where five were constructed by higher education institutions and one from a certificate governing body. The top skills identified across all programs were communication and decision-making. Communication is an all-encompassing idea for collaboration and strong speaking skills, with programs 1,4,5, and 6 noting their importance. Decision-making in this context is about both work delegation and firm problem-solving. For work delegation, it was pointed out in the interviews that techs and engineers see strong leadership utilizing professional judgment as vital to a business’s performance, with all programs but program 4 similarly emphasizing the same. Given this evaluation, the leadership styles used can be identified as Delegative, Strengths-Based, and Transformative. The previously noted interviews and research resulted in a 4-week course demo, which utilized the interviews in conjunction with leadership concepts.