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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The article builds upon case studies and semi-structured interviews at selected larger Danish enterprises.

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.

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.

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.

During the COVID-19 period, agility has been a key instrument in ensuring business survival, e.g. by switching markets, products or sales channels.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how agile project management can foster creativity in project teams.

The study is based on an extensive literature review of agile project management and team creativity and is matching these two to answer the following research questions: (1) how agile project management approach can foster creativity in project teams? and (2) which principles and practices promoted by the most popular agile methodologies enhance creativity in project teams?

Five creativity-conducive spaces in agile project management were identified and integrated into a conceptual framework, namely, a space for generative social interactions, a space for learning, a space for change and adaptation, a space for exploration and a space promoting team members' well-being. In the next step, based on a thorough analysis of seven widespread agile project management methods, a large number of agile principles and practices were mapped into each of the five conceptual spaces.

This study provides new insights into how agile project management can foster creativity in project teams. The conceptual framework developed in this paper might be utilized to enhance creativity in agile teams, it can also serve as a starting point for future research.

Agile project management methods gain increasing attention of practitioners while they often remain neglected by scholarly research. Specifically, there is little known about how performance factors of agile firms differ from those of traditional firms. Scholars argue that these factors often relate to a firm’s human resource management (HRM). This study aims to analyze and compare the HRM architectures in agile and traditional project-based organizations that lead to high firm performance.

The authors apply fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis on data of 154 project-based organizations of diverse professional service industries in Russia.

This study’s findings suggest that HRM architectures of high-performance agile firms imply a broad use of ability-, motivation- and opportunity-enhancing practices and a high degree of HRM process centralization, while traditional firms adopt more diverse HRM architectures.

Based on this study’s results, the authors stress the importance of ensuring a good fit between a company’s project management approach and HRM architecture. The revealed configurations may also provide guidance for practitioners on designing effective HRM architectures in project-based organizations.

This research aimed to explore whether different project management approaches (traditional, agile or hybrid) differentiate concerning their impact on project success, taking project success as multidimensional phenomena. In addition to this, the authors wanted to explore if specific project characteristics moderate these effects.

The authors empirically addressed these on a sample of 227 project professionals worldwide. The exploratory factor analysis (EFA) of project success dimensions was done to validate these factors' constitution concerning their manifest variables. The K-means cluster method was used to distinguish respondents' profiles among agile, hybrid and traditional project management approaches. To test the significance among research groups, the research hypotheses were tested with ANOVA tests.

The authors evidenced that the agile approach has a more significant positive impact concerning the two out of five dimensions of project success, under analysis in this research (impact on the team and preparing for the future), over the traditional approach.

The research is relevant for project management practitioners to tailor the success-oriented project management approach and for academics to develop project management contingency theory.

The authors constructed a research framework to test the impact and effectiveness of different project management approaches (traditional, agile, hybrid) on the dimensions of project success in different contextual conditions (organization industry, project type, novelty, technology, complexity and pace). The paper's main contribution is to expand data on the impact of these approaches on project success and compare them with relevant results and findings of previous research.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This study aims to examine the joint impact of networking capability and agile project management on organizational agility of telecommunication technology providers' in Indonesia. The study also examines the moderating role of market orientation as a predominant strategic orientation on the relationship between agile project management and organizational agility.

Research data were collected via a questionnaire survey from the executive management of telecommunication technology providers in Indonesia to obtain 150 valid questionnaires for analysis. This study analyzed the overall model fit and causal relationship using confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling.

The results indicate that networking capability positively affects organizational agility. However, agile project management's significant effect on organizational agility occurs only when the relationship is moderated by market orientation. The results of the study also demonstrate that organizational agility positively affects organizational performance.

This study is based on a cross-sectional nature and might fail to capture the studied variables' dynamic over an extended period.

The study enriches the previous literature in organizational agility by presenting the collective impact of networking capability and agile project management and the moderating role of market orientation. However, dissimilar with major prior studies, the results indicate that agile project management's direct effect on organizational agility is not significant. Agile project management needs to be moderated by market orientation to create exceptional customer values and overcome the competition for the organization to achieve organizational agility, responsiveness and adaptability to address customers' needs and requirements. Furthermore, the study's result corroborates the importance of organizational agility to achieve organizational performance in the highly dynamic telecommunication industry.

In times of market volatility and uncertainty, finding effective strategies to attract and retain individuals continues to be a challenge for organizations. Based on the psychological empowerment process (Spreitzer, 1996), this paper strives to examine if the application of agile project management could serve as such a strategy.

In two independent studies, the authors used an experiment with students as potential applicants (N = 121) and a field study with employees (N = 229) to test the predictive quality of agile project management for attracting individuals toward the organization.

Using structural equation modeling, the authors identified an indirect relationship between agile project management and attraction toward the organization via psychological empowerment. The authors found this relationship for potential applicants as well as employees. Furthermore, individuals high in sensation seeking are found to be more attracted toward organizations that apply agile project management than individuals low in sensation seeking.

The findings contribute to the empowerment literature by establishing agile project management as a work structure that fosters feelings of psychological empowerment.

Taken together, these results suggest that agile project management can attract individuals who seek novel, complex and intense sensations. Where applicable, organizations may highlight their practice of agile project management methodologies as part of their employer brand to attract future specialists for agile projects.

This paper is the first to integrate the research streams on agile project management and attraction toward the organization using quantitative data.

The purpose of this paper is to build a theoretic and practical framework, based on agile project management, to support the decision-making process in order to help companies in optimizing the reengineering production processes and improve management costs.

This paper seeks to propose an agile Reengineering Performance Model (ARPM) for managing projects of reengineering of processes and applies it in a real case study concerning a water bottling plant.

The proposed model should serve as a valuable tool to facilitate a successful business process reengineering design in the project management and intends to assist companies as they operate projects of transferring and optimizing production lines. Thanks to the use of ARPM tools, it is easy to modify the evolution of the project, with the possibility of extending or enhancing the application if necessary.

The main limits of the ARPM model are: it requires close collaboration among team; it is rather intense for developers; and it is necessary flexibility to change course as needed and to ensure delivery of the right product.

The main implications of the authors’ work for research and business are to propose a structured methodological approach, rigorous but simple, suitable to implement in any companies.

The novelty of the approach is to apply the agile approach not for software development but in a manufacturing company.

Agile methods have considerably transformed project management. The purpose of this study is to analyze the impact of agile (as compared to plan-driven) methods on customer satisfaction in the context of knowledge-intensive business services.

This study uses a survey examining the experiences of 361 customers with different outsourced software projects in Switzerland and a regression-based model to test the hypotheses.

The findings show that agile approaches can lead to higher customer satisfaction than plan-driven approaches, but the impact size is not as substantial as expected. The effect does not depend on the number of specification changes.

Managers must be aware that merely switching from a plan driven to an agile approach will not lead to substantial improvement in customer satisfaction. Satisfaction with the process is a more important driver of overall customer satisfaction than satisfaction with the service outcome. Thus, providers of knowledge-intensive services should train their employees in recognizing the importance of the cooperation process.

So far, the positive impact of agile methods is often only based on anecdotal evidence as well as on surveys examining the supplier perspective. This study provides support for the positive impact of agile methods on customer satisfaction, an important response variable from a marketing perspective, which has not been examined before in the context considered here.