| Course | BU 433 Agile Project Management |
|---|---|
| Unit | Unit 1 |
| Paper type | Agile principles and fit analysis |
| Length | About 1,040 words, 6 pages |
| Format | APA 7 student paper |
| School | Herzing University |
| Program | BS in Project Management |
| Updated | September 2026 |
Free sample paper for BU 433 Unit 1
Iterate on the Renter, Plan the Gate and the Lease: An Agile Principles and Fit Analysis for a Composite Self-Storage Chain Building Online Move-In
Student Name
Business, Herzing University
BU 433: Agile Project Management
Instructor Name
January 14, 2026
Iterate on the Renter, Plan the Gate and the Lease: An Agile Principles and Fit Analysis for a Composite Self-Storage Chain Building Online Move-In
The Situation
Prairie Vault Storage, a composite family-owned company created for this course, runs 11 self-storage facilities in Kansas and western Missouri with about 5,900 units and 38 employees. Today a customer can reserve a unit online, but must visit an office, open 9:00 to 5:30 on weekdays and until 1:00 on Saturdays, to sign a lease, pay and receive a gate code. In 2025, 38 percent of online reservations never became move-ins, and staff believe many of those customers rented from competitors that let them finish online at any hour. The company wants online move-in: choose a unit, sign the lease, pay and receive a gate code on a phone without visiting the office.
A five-person in-house team, formed in 2025 to rebuild the website, will build it. The director of operations acts as product owner for about half of each week. Two developers, a part-time designer and a tester complete the team, and all but the designer work in the Wichita office. The family board approves a budget each January and has asked for online move-in to be working before the May to August moving season, when about 45 percent of yearly move-ins happen. The gate access system at each facility comes from an outside vendor, and lease terms and lien notices are governed by Kansas and Missouri law and approved by outside counsel.
The Principles as Tests
The Manifesto for Agile Software Development (Beck et al., 2001) sets out four values and twelve principles. Rather than summarize them, this analysis asks whether Prairie Vault's situation can satisfy five of the principles that matter most here. Can the team deliver working software frequently? Yes: the website is already deployed weekly, and a feature can be switched on at one facility before others. Can business people and developers work together daily? Partly: the product owner sits in the same office but has operations duties for half the week. Can the team welcome changing requirements? For the renter's experience, yes; for the lease text and the gate integration, no, as explained below. Is working software the primary measure of progress? It can be, if the board accepts a demonstration in place of a status report. Can the team reflect regularly and adjust? Yes, since it is small and already meets every morning.
Where the Approach Fits
Boehm and Turner (2004) describe five factors that decide whether a project sits in agile's home ground or in plan-driven territory: team size, criticality of failure, how fast requirements change, the skill of the people and the organization's culture. On three of the five, Prairie Vault sits firmly on the agile side. The team is five people. Requirements for the renter's experience are highly uncertain, since nobody at the company knows whether customers will want to see a photo of the unit, compare sizes with a video or finish everything on a phone in the parking lot, and the only way to learn is to release something and watch. Failure in that part of the product costs a lost rental, not a safety incident.
Feedback is also fast. With 11 facilities, the team can release to one location, watch completed move-ins and abandoned attempts for two weeks and adjust before the next. Agile methods rest on learning from short feedback cycles (Dingsøyr et al., 2012), and this project has an unusually short cycle available.
Where It Does Not
Three parts of the project do not fit, and they deserve more space than the parts that do, because they are where an agile plan would fail quietly.
The lease and lien notices are fixed by law and by counsel. Self-storage operators in both states must give customers specific notices about what happens when rent goes unpaid, and the wording must be approved before the first online lease is signed. That scope cannot be discovered iteratively, and counsel reviews documents on a schedule of weeks, not days. Treating the lease as a backlog item to refine sprint by sprint would invite a version reaching customers before it is approved.
The gate integration depends on the access control vendor, which has quoted a fixed-price contract to open its interface, with delivery in 14 weeks. The team cannot iterate on something it does not yet have, and it cannot change the vendor's timetable by holding shorter meetings.
The board approves money once a year and expects a list of what it will receive. That is the personnel and culture side of Boehm and Turner's factors: a family board comfortable with fixed plans, and a team whose two developers are capable but have not worked in a formal iterative process before.
What Is Traded Away
If Prairie Vault builds the renter's experience iteratively, it gives up predictability of final scope. The board would be told in January that online move-in will be live at one facility by April and at all 11 by June, but not exactly which features it will include. Unit photos, size comparisons and a Spanish-language version might arrive in May or might be dropped if completed move-ins show customers do not need them. In return the company gets something working early and features shaped by what renters actually do. The trade should be put to the board plainly, since a board that believes it bought a fixed list will feel misled when the list changes.
Recommended Approach for This Case
Prairie Vault should use an iterative approach for the renter-facing experience, planned in two-week cycles and released facility by facility, and plan-driven management for the lease content and the gate integration, each with fixed milestones tracked alongside the sprints. The lease text should be treated as an external dependency with a firm approval date in March, and the gate interface as a vendor milestone in mid-April, with a manual fallback, a staff member texting the gate code, ready if the interface is late. This is a hybrid by design, not by accident, and the course's later units test whether the team can hold it together. The company, its facilities and every figure here are composites written for this course.
References
Beck, K., Beedle, M., van Bennekum, A., Cockburn, A., Cunningham, W., Fowler, M., Grenning, J., Highsmith, J., Hunt, A., Jeffries, R., Kern, J., Marick, B., Martin, R. C., Mellor, S., Schwaber, K., Sutherland, J., & Thomas, D. (2001). Manifesto for agile software development. https://agilemanifesto.org/
Boehm, B., & Turner, R. (2004). Balancing agility and discipline: A guide for the perplexed. Addison-Wesley.
Dingsøyr, T., Nerur, S., Balijepally, V., & Moe, N. B. (2012). A decade of agile methodologies: Towards explaining agile software development. Journal of Systems and Software, 85(6), 1213-1221. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2012.02.033
BU 433 Unit 1 instructions, in plain terms
The opening unit of BU 433 asks students to explain agile values and principles and judge whether they suit a particular project. Prompts usually want the situation described, including what is being built, how well requirements are understood, how quickly feedback is available and how funding works. Students then apply the principles, argue where the approach fits and where it does not, and name what an organization gives up by adopting it. Many instructors expect the Agile Manifesto to be cited directly and welcome a framework such as Boehm and Turner's home ground factors. A balanced conclusion scores better than a defense of agile. Papers commonly run three or four pages in APA 7, and a recommendation limited to the case in hand is expected.
Inside the BU 433 Unit 1 example
The paper opens with the company, its reservation problem, the team, the board's budget habit and two outside dependencies. Five principles are then posed as questions about this case and answered one by one. The fit section uses Boehm and Turner's five factors to show why uncertain renter behavior, a small team and fast facility-by-facility feedback favor iteration. A longer section explains the three misfits: legally fixed lease content, a vendor interface on a fixed contract and an annual approval culture. A short section states the trade, a fixed feature list exchanged for early working software, and says how it should be put to the board. The close recommends a deliberate hybrid, with a manual gate code fallback if the vendor is late.
BU 433 Unit 1 rubric: what full points look like
Rubrics for the fit analysis typically award points for accurate explanation of agile values and principles, analysis of the project context, a balanced assessment of fit and misfit, identification of trade-offs and a justified recommendation, with writing and citations as a separate criterion. Explanation earns credit for applying principles rather than listing them. Context analysis rewards specific facts about requirements, feedback and funding. The balance criterion is where many papers lose points; instructors look for concrete reasons agile might not suit parts of the project. Trade-off analysis scores highest when the student names exactly what is exchanged. The recommendation earns full marks when it is limited to the case described and explains how the organization would manage the parts that stay plan-driven.
BU 433 Unit 1 help before you submit
The fit analysis most often loses points when it reads as a defense of agile, listing its benefits without testing them against the situation. Another frequent problem is summarizing all twelve principles without applying any of them. Students also describe the project vaguely, so the reader cannot judge fit at all. Some papers ignore constraints such as regulation, vendor contracts or annual budgets, which are exactly where agile struggles. Others recommend agile or waterfall for the whole project when parts clearly need different handling. A common omission is the trade itself: predictability of scope is what agile gives up, and a paper that never says so has not weighed the choice honestly. Citing blog summaries instead of the manifesto weakens the explanation.
Get a BU 433 Unit 1 example written to your instructions
Send the Unit 1 instructions and the rubric posted in your BU 433 classroom, plus the scenario or organization your section supplies. We write a custom example that describes the situation first, turns each principle into a question about it, gives misfit the longer treatment and names what the approach trades away. First custom sample free, back in 24 to 48 hours.
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BU 433 Unit 1 questions, answered
Do I have to defend agile in this paper?
No, and papers that do tend to score lower. The criterion in most sections is analysis rather than advocacy, which means the marker is looking for conditions under which the approach fails as hard as for the ones where it works. A paper concluding that this particular situation suits a plan-driven approach can score very well when the reasoning holds up.
Which principles should the paper cover?
The ones the instructions name, and beyond that the ones the situation actually tests. A paper marching through all of them at a sentence each shows they were read; four examined against the case shows they were understood. Say which you set aside and why, so a reader does not assume the rest were simply forgotten.
Can I write about my own workplace?
Describe the kind of situation without the identifying detail, and keep the internal material out. Delivery schedules, board decisions, the state of a live program and what colleagues said in meetings belong to the employer even when you sat in the room. A composite situation, labeled as one in the opening, gives the argument everything it needs.
Where can I find a free BU 433 Unit 1 sample paper?
The complete BU 433 Unit 1 agile principles and fit analysis appears on this page at no charge, with its fit and misfit sections and margin notes. Working on a different project or organization? A custom fit analysis can be prepared free from your instructions, usually within two days.
Does BU 433 Unit 1 have to recommend agile?
No. The unit rewards a judgment grounded in the case. The sample recommends iteration for the renter experience only and plan-driven handling for the lease and vendor work, which instructors tend to credit as a balanced answer.