Search results
1 – 10 of over 2000Albi Thomas and M. Suresh
This study aims to identify the agile-sustainability readiness factors and analyze them in the context of health-care organization. In this study, agile-sustainability refers to…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to identify the agile-sustainability readiness factors and analyze them in the context of health-care organization. In this study, agile-sustainability refers to “adapt to the changing environment and respond quickly by maximum using the resources as well as supporting the three pillars of sustainability”.
Design/methodology/approach
The “total interpretive structural modelling” (TISM) is used to examine the interrelationships of the identified readiness factors, and to classify the identified readiness factors based on its power to drive and depend on other factors, “Matrice d’impacts croisés multiplication appliquée á un classment (MICMAC) analysis” was used.
Findings
This study used a “literature review and experts’ opinion” to identify ten agile-sustainability preparedness characteristics. Organizational leadership, multi-skilled and multi-knowledgeable employees and decision-making autonomy were identified as critical elements in this study.
Research limitations/implications
The research focuses primarily on readiness for agile-sustainability in health-care sector.
Practical implications
This research aids health-care administrators and managers in their decision-making. This study suggests that the evaluation of the readiness factors would promote in raising service standards, ensuring an agile and sustainable health-care operations. The readiness elements that support effective implementation of agile-sustainability in health care require a higher priority from health-care management.
Originality/value
This study created a structural model for health-care organizations based on the TISM-based preparedness for agile-sustainability framework, which is a novel effort for adopting agile-sustainability in health care.
Details
Keywords
Maja Due Kadenic and Torben Tambo
Agile project management methods are on the rise compared to linear approaches. The demand for the demonstrable resilience of enterprise processes is likewise strongly increasing…
Abstract
Purpose
Agile project management methods are on the rise compared to linear approaches. The demand for the demonstrable resilience of enterprise processes is likewise strongly increasing in many domains. This paper explores the potential contribution of agility within the domain of agile project management to the resilience of the operating model of an organization.
Design/methodology/approach
The article builds upon case studies and semi-structured interviews at selected larger Danish enterprises.
Findings
Responding to disruptions favors adaptive and flexible approaches, which are more achievable with agile methods. By exploring the patterns of agility and resilience throughout case studies, the authors derive at a 7-step approach for considering the potentials of agility to ensure the resilience of the operating model from the top level of leadership to the foundational level of technology.
Research limitations/implications
This article seeks to contribute to a more profound understanding of the impact, potential and actionability of agile project management in the light of operational resilience.
Practical implications
It is demonstrated that agile methods are attractive for ensuring the constitutive elements of the resilience of the operating model in terms of conscious contingencies and choices involving (rapid) changes.
Social implications
During the COVID-19 period, agility has been a key instrument in ensuring business survival, e.g. by switching markets, products or sales channels.
Originality/value
Agility has the potential to build a strategic dimension of resilience, a synergistic relationship, which is linked to the responsiveness of an organization to change promptly, with a view toward renewal and transformation.
Details
Keywords
Ewa Sońta-Drączkowska and Agnieszka Krogulec
This study seeks to illuminate the managerial tensions inherent in implementing scaled agile (on the organizational, top management, middle management and team levels) and to…
Abstract
Purpose
This study seeks to illuminate the managerial tensions inherent in implementing scaled agile (on the organizational, top management, middle management and team levels) and to frame these challenges within the broader context of project management.
Design/methodology/approach
The study adopts a grounded theory approach and delves into a qualitative dataset sourced from 34 interviews with subject matter experts actively engaged in scaling agile initiatives within large organizations spanning various industries. Additionally, the data have been enriched through a comprehensive literature review of the existing body of knowledge on scaling agile.
Findings
As a result of our investigation, we propose a framework of managerial tensions in scaling agile in large corporate settings and a series of research propositions and questions that may contribute significantly to the body of knowledge surrounding the phenomenon of “deprojectification” and propose agenda for the future studies in the field of project management.
Research limitations/implications
The study also carries significant managerial implications. Firstly, based on the insights from the practice of scaling agile in large corporate setting, management can build awareness of the challenges inherent of transitioning to agile practices. This may help to anticipate the possible problems and proactively develop strategies how to address them. Secondly, management can be instructed about contingencies inherent in scaling agile, along with the potential disfunctions and side effects (unintended outcomes) that may emerge during the transition process. Thirdly, project management practitioners can gain insights on how scaling agile may cause shifts in the approach to managing projects, project team management and competencies that need to be developed to cope with environments where various approaches to managing projects coexist.
Practical implications
These insights can aid in the agile transition process, beginning with directing managerial attention toward contextual factors and progressing through potential challenges at the organizational, top management, middle management and team levels. Furthermore, the study highlights possible dysfunctionalities and side effects of scaling agile, shedding light on the “dark side” of agile.
Originality/value
The study contributes to the expansion of the empirical database on the implementation of agile practices in large organizational settings. It plays a role in defining and delineating the phenomenon of scaling agile within the context of project management and outlines a research agenda for future project management studies. Additionally, our study adds to the ongoing discourse surrounding the “deprojectification” effect that can occur during the scaling of agile. Lastly, it establishes connections between project management and software development literature regarding the implementation of agile at scale.
Details
Keywords
Vasja Roblek, Vlado Dimovski, Kristjan Jovanov Oblak, Maja Meško and Judita Peterlin
This study aims to apply the Delphi method to explore the possibilities for implementing agility management concepts in Slovenian health-care organisations.
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to apply the Delphi method to explore the possibilities for implementing agility management concepts in Slovenian health-care organisations.
Design/methodology/approach
The research is based on a qualitative Delphi study encompassing 15 employees in different Slovenian health-care organisations.
Findings
Slovenian health-care organisations need to be more agile currently. For this reason, it is necessary to begin with organisational changes and organisational learning concepts to educate employees about the meaning and content of agile processes. It is essential to ensure that accepting employee mistakes and offering help to employees becomes normal practice, and it is necessary to ensure the greater trust of the management towards the employees.
Originality/value
The research empowers health-care professionals with new management and leadership concepts, such as agile management, sustainable leadership and leadership development methods in health care.
Details
Keywords
Lysander Weiss, Lucas Vergin and Dominik K. Kanbach
Achieving continuous innovation performance still poses a major challenge to established companies as it requires high flexibility and adaptability in usually efficiently…
Abstract
Achieving continuous innovation performance still poses a major challenge to established companies as it requires high flexibility and adaptability in usually efficiently structured organisations. One way to tackle this challenge lies in establishing effective behaviours to successfully establish and apply innovation leadership mechanisms in an organisation. The emerging agile leadership style could provide such effective behaviours, as it addresses the demand for flexibility and adaptability on the organisational level. Despite these clear parallels research on the link between agile leadership and innovation leadership, and their possible combined contribution to drive continuous innovation performance is still in its infancy. Accordingly, the present study examines the behaviours of agile leaders to promote continuous innovation in established companies. It applies a discovery-driven research process of agile leaders to derive and categorise their behaviours. The subsequent comparison of the identified agile leadership behaviours with innovation leadership mechanisms from existing literature leads to eight specific, combined agile leadership principles within the three categories empowerment, performance enhancement, and support for continuous innovation. Eventually, this basis allows the conceptualisation of a first exploratory framework with the identified behaviours as possible enablers, and innovation leadership mechanisms as possible mediators for the continuous innovation performance, subject to test. These findings enhance existing theory by clarifying a possible link between agile leadership and continuous innovation. That way, practitioners can profit from concrete principles for agile leaders to inspire and enable continuous innovation in individuals and teams.
Details
Keywords
Eder Junior Alves and Carlos Alberto Gonçalves
The purpose of this study is to present an empirical framework for changes, communication and team restructuring developed through a substantive theory that defines the…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to present an empirical framework for changes, communication and team restructuring developed through a substantive theory that defines the relationships between Agile adoption and organizational strategies in the Brazilian marketplace, providing assertive propositions.
Design/methodology/approach
The research analysed five case studies of private companies in the Brazilian market, adopting the grounded theory (GT) method to examine the relationships between the categories. There was consistency in the reality of 22 participatory interviews with experts in Agile in the five case studies. The excellent integration between the chosen methodological approach and the organizations' characteristics reinforces a strategy focused on mixed methods.
Findings
As a result, the authors deploy an empirical framework, displaying new strategies that generate structural changes, obtaining Agile information technology (IT) project portfolio management (PPM) practices and strategies with superior performance. The necessary responses through organizational structural changes are observed, making it possible to notice changes in routines and contingencies.
Research limitations/implications
Some limitations should be pointed out for this study. The case studies were carried out in private companies in Brazil, and cultural aspects must be considered if one wants to generalize. Furthermore, to underline the effects of time, a longitudinal study would have to be employed to improve the interpretation of the results. Another limitation applies to the framework proposed in our study and its reality-simplifying nature. Models and theories with these visible generic characteristics compromise understanding specific situations.
Practical implications
The authors strongly recommend that teams focus on communication among stakeholders to increase the ability to adopt Agile and create valuable knowledge inside the organizations, architecting process innovation.
Originality/value
The forged strategic Agile substantive theory contributes to the competitive Brazilian IT company departments. The need for velocity in organizing teams, accomplishing changes and efficient communication challenges connecting value creation with project results.
Details
Keywords
Marya Tabassum, Muhammad Mustafa Raziq and Naukhez Sarwar
Agile project teams are self-managing and self-organizing teams, and these two characteristics are pivotal attributes of emergent leadership. Emergent leadership is thus common in…
Abstract
Purpose
Agile project teams are self-managing and self-organizing teams, and these two characteristics are pivotal attributes of emergent leadership. Emergent leadership is thus common in agile teams – however, how these (informal) emergent leaders can be identified in teams remains far from understood. The purpose of this research is to uncover techniques that enable top management to identify emergent agile leaders.
Methodology/design
We approached six agile teams from four organizations. We employ social network analysis (SNA) and aggregation approaches to identify emergent agile leaders.
Design/methodology/approach
We approached six agile teams from four organizations. We employ SNA and aggregation approaches to identify emergent agile leaders.
Findings
Seven emergent leaders are identified using the SNA and aggregation approaches. The same leaders are also identified using the KeyPlayer algorithms. One emergent leader is identified from each of the five teams, for a total of five emergent leaders from the five teams. However, two emergent leaders are identified for the remaining sixth team.
Originality/value
Emergent leadership is a relatively new phenomenon where leaders emerge from within teams without having a formal leadership assigned role. A challenge remains as to how such leaders can be identified without any formal leadership status. We contribute by showing how network analysis and aggregation approaches are suitable for the identification of emergent leadership talent within teams. In addition, we help advance leadership research by describing the network behaviors of emergent leaders and offering a way forward to identify more than one emergent leader in a team. We also show some limitations of the approaches used and offer some useful insights.
Details
Keywords
Chaitanya Arun Sathe and Chetan Panse
This study aims to examine the enablers of productivity of enterprise-level Agile development process using modified total interpretative structural modeling (TISM). The two main…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to examine the enablers of productivity of enterprise-level Agile development process using modified total interpretative structural modeling (TISM). The two main objectives of the current study are to determine the variables influencing enterprise-level agile development productivity and to develop modified TISM for the corresponding components.
Design/methodology/approach
To identify enablers of the productivity of enterprise-level agile software development process a literature review and opinions of domain experts were collected. A hierarchical relationship among variables that show direct and indirect influence is created using the modified TISM (M-TISM) technique with Cross Impact Matrix-Multiplication Applied to Classification analysis. This study examined and analyzed the relationships between the determinants within the enterprise using a M-TISM technique.
Findings
With the literature review, the study could identify ten enabling factors of the productivity of Agile development process at the enterprise level. Results depict that program increment (PI) planning and scalable backlog management, continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), agile release trains (ART), agile work culture, delivery excellence, lean and DevOps practices, value stream mapping (VMS), team skills and expertise, collaborative culture, agile coaching, customer engagement have an impact on the productivity of enterprise-level Agile development process. The results show that team collaboration, agile ways of working and customer engagement have a greater impact on productivity improvement for enterprise-level Agile development process.
Research limitations/implications
The developed model is useful for organizations employing scaled Agile development processes in software development. This study provides a recommended listing of key enablers, that may enable productivity improvements in the Agile development process at the enterprise level. Strategists should focus on team collaboration and Agile project management. This study offers a modified TISM model to academicians to help them understand the effects of numerous variables on maintaining the productivity of an enterprise-level Agile. The identified characteristics and their hierarchical structure can help project managers during the execution of Agile projects at the enterprise level, more effectively, increasing their success and productivity.
Originality/value
The study addresses the gap in the literature by interpretative relationships between the identified enabling factors. The model validation is carried out by a panel of nine experts from several information technology organizations deploying Agile software development at the enterprise level. This unique method broadens the knowledge base in Agile software development at scale and provides project managers and practitioners with a practical foundation.
Details
Keywords
Jyoti Motwani and Aakanksha Katatria
The purpose of this literature review paper is to explore the concept of organization agility and its relevance in today's dynamic business environment. By conducting an in-depth…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this literature review paper is to explore the concept of organization agility and its relevance in today's dynamic business environment. By conducting an in-depth review of existing academic and industry literature on organization agility, this study aims to identify the key factors that influence an organization's agility and the benefits and drawbacks associated with fostering agility.
Design/methodology/approach
Through the technique of bibliometric analysis, we provide the growth trajectory of the field by identifying the publication trends, prominent authors and countries and most prolific journal publishing in the concerned domain. We also provide the intellectual structure of the organization agility research by identifying the prominent themes that have been worked upon till date. In addition, with the backing of the theories, contexts, characteristics and methodology (TCCM) framework, we identify the most frequently applied theories, constructs and methods in organization agility research and provide new avenues for future research by analyzing the most frequently used theories, methods, constructs and research contexts.
Findings
With the ever-increasing ambiguity and need for change (why), organization agility serves as the organization's backbone. It acts as a springboard for the organization, an anchor point that remains constant while other functional aspects constantly fluctuate and change. Organization agility can be defined (what) as the ability of organizations to quickly respond to market needs by sensing, renewing, adapting and succeeding in a turbulent market. To summarize, organizational agility matters at three fundamental aspects (where): strategic level or the market capitalizing level, internal operational level and individual level.
Originality/value
This paper is unique in the sense that it is the first comprehensive literature review in the field of organization agility research to use a hybrid methodology (bibliometric review with TCCMs).
Details
Keywords
Daniele Binci, Corrado Cerruti, Giorgia Masili and Cristina Paternoster
The purpose of this study is to explore the agile project management (APM) approach through the contextual ambidextrous lens by overcoming the traditional perspective that…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to explore the agile project management (APM) approach through the contextual ambidextrous lens by overcoming the traditional perspective that separates projects within the opposite planned-exploitation- and emergent-exploration-oriented forms.
Design/methodology/approach
This study uses a grounded approach to five different agile-oriented companies for discovering how agile adoption shows both emergent (exploration-oriented) and planned (exploitation-oriented) tensions in a perspective that connects, rather than separates, them.
Findings
This study discovers five main categories, namely, approach, objectives, boundaries, leadership and feedback, that capture the tensions between planned and emergent issues of agile projects. The identified variables interact with different intervening conditions of the APM attributes (i.e. road map, product backlog, team backlog and solution delivery), activating different response actions (“exploitation embedded in exploration” and vice-versa), requiring, as a consequence, the need for contextual ambidexterity.
Research limitations/implications
This study identifies different implications based on real project contexts, as the importance of a more complete picture of the APM approach, which also considers the combination of planned and emergent aspects of projects and, as consequence, the needs for dual capacities (T-shaped skills) both at project management and team levels.
Practical implications
This study identifies, in real project contexts, the relevance of integration between the corporate level and the agile project team. This implies the search for constant dialogue, with feedback exchange spread across all levels, also enabled by an integrated leadership approach.
Originality/value
This study highlights agile tensions in a real-world project context by describing how APM connects both explorative and exploitative aspects of change within the same APM initiative, in order to manage such tensions, which differs from previous studies that consider APM in alternation with a linear project management approach as stage-gate.
Details