Search results

The purpose of this study is to examine knowledge management (KM) infrastructure and processes on automobile manufacturing firm innovative performance through the mediating role of agile project management (APM) practice.

The data collection involved purposive and convenience sampling techniques to gather information from 692 employees employed in various public and private automobile manufacturing firms operating in Pakistan. To test the hypothesis, data analysis was conducted using Smart PLS software version 4, using the partial least squares and structural equation modeling technique.

The result revealed that knowledge management infrastructure and processes has a positive and significant effect on firm innovative performance. Moreover, agile project management practices positively and significantly mediate the relationship between knowledge management infrastructure and processes and firm innovative performance.

The performance of high-tech automobile manufacturing firms can be enhanced by implementing agile project management practices, especially when stimulated by external factors such as innovation. In an increasingly dynamic environment, innovation acts as a favorable factor that amplifies the positive impact of agile methodologies on firm performance.

Researchers can use these findings to identify knowledge gaps that need to be addressed in future studies and understand how strategies relate to processes within the KM-APM framework. This study provides practitioners with insights on applying KM practices in an APM context to enhance knowledge performance. Practitioners can use the framework to plan KM activities that support corporate strategy across all organizational layers, ensuring the appropriate knowledge is conveyed at each level.

The literature has not yet delved sufficiently deeper into the holistic relationship between organisational culture and agile project management. This paper aims to address this literature gap by delineating the specifics of why and how organisational culture affects agile project management.

This paper addresses this literature gap by conducting a systematic literature review of empirical research investigating how organisational culture affects agile project management. This paper draws on the competing values framework to explain how various dimensions of organisational culture influence the technical and social streams of agile project management.

The findings underscored the detrimental effects of hierarchical culture, characterised by rigid organisational structures, formal communication with management and resistance to change acceptance, on both the technical and social aspects of agile projects. In contrast, the positive impact of group culture on the social aspect was evident through employee empowerment and teamwork. Moreover, the rational culture dimension demonstrated favourable effects on both streams, emphasising market knowledge, financial development and business opportunities. Finally, the developmental culture dimension supported customer collaboration, knowledge sharing and innovation.

The focus on the “mutability” of organisational culture has led to four research propositions delineating specific ways of cultivating organisational culture to be more conducive to agile projects, marking a first in the academic literature.

With the increasing agility of IT enterprises, it is crucial to identify suitable managerial strategies for controlling information system development (ISD) projects in the new agile working environments. These environments are characterized by the collaborative nature of work and the recurring nature of communication. This study aims to explore how perceived transparency in ISD processes, controlled by transparency strategies, impacts project quality.

In collaboration with a firm that implemented a customized Scaled Agile Framework, questionnaires were distributed to employees involved in ISD projects. The goal was to understand the influence of perceived transparency in ISD processes on project quality.

Our research demonstrates that perceived transparency in ISD processes enhances project quality through knowledge exchange by strengthening goodwill trust among team members. Additionally, transparency improves project quality through client feedback by strengthening competence trust of clients toward the team. Goodwill trust of clients toward the team and competence trust among team members have less impact on project quality enhancement.

This study reveals the nomological network among the perceived transparency, different types of trust among stakeholders, social interactions among stakeholders, and project outcomes in agile ISD environments. This nomological network has been overlooked by previous studies that biased toward top-down, interorganizational communication. It highlights that not all types of trust among stakeholders are involved in the processes through which perceived transparency influences ISD project quality in agile working environments. Additionally, it exposes the limitations of transparency strategies for controlling projects in agile IT enterprises.

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 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.

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.

This paper seeks to examine how expectations from business analytics (BA) by members of agile information systems development (ISD) teams affect their perceptions and continuous use of BA in ISD projects.

Data was collected from 153 respondents working in agile ISD projects and analysed using partial least squares structural equation modelling techniques (PLS-SEM).

Perceived usefulness and technological compatibility are the most salient factors that affect BA continuance intention in agile ISD projects. The proposed model explains 48.4% of the variance for BA continuance intention, 50.6% of the variance in satisfaction, 36.7% of the variance in perceived usefulness and 31.9% of the variance in technological compatibility.

First, this study advances understanding of the factors that affect the continuous use of BA in agile ISD projects; second, it contextualizes the expectation-confirmation model by integrating technological compatibility in the context of agile ISD projects.

This is the first study to investigate BA continuance intention from an employee perspective in the context of agile ISD projects.

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.