Retrospective Analysis of Implemented Project Management within a Small-Scale Student Engineering Project: BENG Fountain Wars Team Case Study

This honors thesis provides a retrospective analysis of how the 2025 inaugural University of Arkansas’s ASABE Fountain Wars Student Team could be improved through project management. Project commitment, early stakeholder influence, rich communication, and a detailed project plan are all attributes of successful projects, and the team’s strengths and weaknesses within these categories were determined through a team poll. After the poll was conducted, three methodologies, Agile, Hybrid, and Waterfall, were assessed to determine how they would effectively address the team’s weaknesses. A weighted objectives table was created to compare each methodology’s effectiveness across the management categories. The analysis revealed that having a detailed project plan was the team’s major weakness, which positioned the Traditional methodology as the highest-scoring option. However, upon reflection of both the quantitative and qualitative experiences of the team, a Hybrid approach with a lean towards Waterfall would be the best retrospective fit for the team.