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In the midst of a major corporate reorganization and an ever‐changing industry landscape, how does a corporate real estateorganization successfully build enterprise alliances and create integrated approaches to problem solving in order to 1) realign the real estate portfolio and 2) achieve optimal real estate portfolio efficiencies? The answer lies in the use of enterprise program management approaches to identify stakeholders and to invest in lifecycle management. This case study will examine how Sprint Enterprise Property Services successfully adopted the use of enterprise program management principles in order to achieve significant gains in process improvements, to transform a traditional work environment, and to institute a dynamic long‐term vacancy reduction plan for the corporate real estate portfolio.

The purpose of this paper is to set out the results of research which shows the gender pay gap among graduates and outline some of the steps being taken to combat this at the University of Bath. Notably, it highlights the Sprint programme, developed for women undergraduates. This programme aims to add value to the overall student experience at university, improve employability and help to ensure that each undergraduate – regardless of her subject, department or career aspirations – can develop to her fullest potential.

This paper outlines the Sprint programme and reports on how it is being used specifically by the University of Bath. It contains the results of interviews with the deliverers, sponsors and stakeholders of the Sprint programme.

The Sprint programme helps women focus on their studies at university, achieving results such as improved visibility and effectiveness in tutorials, better time management, less study stress, a boost in confidence and self-esteem. They also use Sprint to sharpen their career goals, raise their aspirations, explore possibilities and to take advantage of the work shadowing, internships and mentoring often offered by corporate sponsors.

It is possible to bridge the gender pay gap as well as benefit women in other ways via learning and development activities, such as those promoted via the Sprint programme.

With help from programmes such as Sprint, women can achieve improved work visibility and effectiveness, better time management, reduced stress, increased confidence and self-esteem. This helps them achieve their career goals, raise their aspirations and generally develop their careers.

Women can learn to compete effectively with men in the workplace as well as be successful in their personal lives (in terms of sorting out difficult relationships, improving fitness and gaining a better study/life balance). This offers many benefits for women – and for the well-being of society in general.

The Sprint programme is unique – and is, increasingly, proving valuable. Although the Sprint programme is relatively new – having started in 2013 – it is already bearing positive results. This is not just true in terms of narrowing the gender pay gap but also in terms of improved business networking and heightened self-confidence among other factors.

The purpose of this paper is to set out the results of research which showed the gender pay gap among graduates and outline some of the steps being taken to combat this. In particular, it outlines the Sprint programme, developed for women undergraduates. This programme aims to add value to the overall student experience at university, improve employability and help to ensure that each undergraduate – regardless of her subject, department or career aspirations – can develop to her fullest potential.

This paper comprises results of research carried out by Oxford University’s Careers Service. It also contains the results of interviews with the developers, deliverers, sponsors and users of the Sprint programme – a programme which was developed as a response to these research findings.

The Sprint programme helps women focus on their studies at university, achieving results such as improved visibility and effectiveness in tutorials, better time management, less study stress, a boost in confidence and self-esteem. They also use Sprint to sharpen their career goals, raise their aspirations, explore possibilities and to take advantage of the work shadowing, internships and mentoring often offered by corporate sponsors. Participants in the Sprint programme also tend to find it also helps them to achieve results in their personal lives – such as sorting out difficult relationships, improving fitness and gaining a better study/life balance.

It is possible to bridge the gender pay gap as well as benefit women in other ways via learning and development activities, such as those promoted via the Sprint programme.

With help from programmes such as Sprint, women can achieve improved work visibility and effectiveness, better time management, reduced stress, increased confidence and self-esteem. This helps them achieve their career goals, raise their aspirations and generally develop their careers.

Women can be helped to compete effectively with men in the workplace as well as be successful in their personal lives (in terms of sorting out difficult relationships, improving fitness and gaining a better study/life balance). This offers many benefits for women – and for the well-being of society in general.

The Sprint programme, along with the approach of The Springboard Consultancy, is unique. Although the Sprint programme is relatively new – having started in 2013 – it is already bearing positive results.

In the spring of 2016, the University of Kansas Libraries piloted Research Sprints: One Week, One Project, a program aimed at cultivating relationships with faculty through deep project-based engagement.

Three faculty members, matched with a team of library experts, worked intensively to complete a research or pedagogic project for one week in May. Critical to the program’s success was the use of project management methodologies and tools. These tools were essential to identifying task dependencies, developing workflows, and documenting work processes.

The overall success of the Sprints demonstrated to faculty that library staff can be more than one-shot consultants; faculty collaborators learned first hand that the library can be a true partner throughout the scholarly process. As an approach to user engagement, Sprints pose some considerations for library management, including the need for robust staff training in project management and teambuilding, internal resistance to utilizing project management tools, difficulty finding staff time and resources to commit for a short but high-concentrated period, and the need to align projects with staff expertise and availability.

This chapter provides an assessment of the Sprints pilot, addressing some of the implications, potential benefits, and challenges of adopting and adapting Research Sprints to support library work. It will be of interest to project managers and library staff who are considering integrating project management methods into their outreach and services, and provides examples of how project management can inform library efforts to more deeply collaborate in advancing the scholarly work of local research and teaching communities.

Design approaches to innovation are booming in both the academic and practitioner worlds. Tech giants are proposing different methodologies to develop technological innovation leveraging design principles, for example, Amazon with working backward and Google with Design Sprint. However, little is known on the role of these methodologies in managing the knowledge translation among different stakeholders. This paper aims to investigate how Design Sprint approaches can face digital challenges and foster collaborations.

Through interviews and participatory observations of ten exploratory cases of SME adoption of the Design Sprint methodology, data were collected, organized, clustered and then validated. Furthermore, by adopting a configuration theory perspective, the data have been processed to contribute to the emergence of two Design Sprint organizational taxonomy.

Competences, type of design challenge and the process followed emerge from the cases as key drivers of different Design Sprint configurations. Moreover, the configuration theory helped in identifying two Design Sprint taxonomies named Willing and Wondering configurations. Finally, the paper provides managers with practical guidelines on how to leverage these configurations to make this approach more effective for SMEs and how this method helps the knowledge translation.

The value and originality of the paper are in defining Design Sprint from a theoretical point of view and offering practical guidelines on how to adapt it to the particular context of collaborative digital environments of SMEs. Moreover, it contributes to enlarging the relevance of configurational theory in the creative industries.

Mastering innovation in highly regulated markets might require companies to overcome significant barriers. Rules, laws and limitations on social, economic and institutional dimensions can hinder the ability of a company to transfer knowledge within and across organizational boundaries. However, as recent research in innovation management increasingly advocates user involvement and early understanding of user needs as best practices, the inability to freely interact with customers due to highly regulated market restrictions can hinder the company’s capability to innovate. Hence, this paper aims to shed light on how an emerging managerial approach, such as Design Sprint, can support companies operating in highly regulated markets to overcome user involvement limitations and boost human-centered innovation.

This paper sheds light on how to boost innovation in a highly regulated market by leveraging an in-depth case study. The study investigates the use of the Design Sprint approach adopted by the pharmaceutical multinational Johnson & Johnson to revise the way its R&D department orchestrates the new product development process, overcoming the user involvement challenges of highly regulated markets.

In analyzing six different projects undertaken in the past two years, the findings illustrate three microfoundational dimensions of the Design Sprint approach in highly regulated markets, the so-called 3T model: team, time and tools. Indeed, deploying the Design Sprint in a highly regulated market has proven that being able to experiment in the early stages, building rough prototypes in real-time and openly collaborating with partners is crucial to boost innovation and anticipate constraints.

The paper sheds light on the Design Sprint approach by initially grounding an emerging managerial approach on organizational and management theory, leveraging the lens of microfoundations. In doing so, this study suggests how Design Sprint is based on the pillars of experimentation, knowledge transfer and co-creation usually neglected in highly regulated markets where user involvement is challenging. Finally, this study discloses the importance of using a design-based methodology in fostering innovation in highly regulated markets.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the benefits of the agile project management (APM) framework compared to the traditional waterfall model, and understand how it can help companies add value and gain competitive advantage.

The methodology used was the exploratory qualitative research through a case study of a software project, developed with the support and application of the Scrum framework, in a pharmaceutical industry information technology project.

There were benefits found in the utilization of the agile framework, such as increased motivation and staff satisfaction, better control of requirements and especially higher quality of the delivered system, generating added value to the organization. Additionally, the project allowed the use of features from the first month of the application deployed, enabling a 75 percent reduction in development time, compared to traditional methods. The software development time was four months, 30 percent of what would be the total if the traditional methodology was adopted. Based on the results, the agile framework, especially the Scrum, proved to be a viable option as a project management approach.

Since this research is an exploratory case study, its results cannot be generalized.

The paper provides relevant practical information and experiences to managers interested in implementing APM, as well as those interested in improving the management of projects.

This paper provides a case study with practical implications of using APM, and APM’s benefits and advantages are compared with the traditional waterfall approach. Companies can use this case study to better understand about the advantages and strengths of APM over the traditional approach.

The purpose of this study is to analyse the ways in which mobile operators in the USA that previously presented themselves as providers of essentially a single service have had to adapt to the requirements of a multi-play world that includes mobile and fixed-wire voice, broadband internet and Pay-TV.

The approach is empirical in its entirety and based upon a historical review of the actions of (primarily) the nationwide mobile operators in the USA. Account is taken of the actions of companies in what were historically separate spheres of business such as cable and satellite.

It can be seen that there has been a great deal of restructuring activity in the US mobile sector during the past decade driven by a number of factors such as the need to achieve scale and to provide high-date-rate transmission. However, in very recent times, the main driving force has been the need to gear up for the provision of multi-play services.

The next few years will see an acceleration of restructuring activity as previously independent companies link up voluntarily or via takeovers.

It can be argued that it is the evolving use of smartphones, especially among those aged under 30, that is a key reason why mobile operators are having to change their business models, rather than the reverse.

Regulators, in particular, appear to be stuck in a world in which different segments of the world of telecommunications continue to plough independent furrows. However, multi-play is the future of the sector and there has not so far been much attention paid to this phenomenon.

The Transformation Sprint methodology provides a customer-focused analysis process in which leaders can learn about how their digital operating model should and can evolve.

Agile transformation processes are a learning journey to produce a generative (learning) model. In an Agile setting, the plan should unfold along with experience.

Sprints with specific time spans are intended to circumvent scope-creep or other insidious ways that a project can overrun.

In Agile practice, showing and talking about work is a crucial part of the process. Transformation Sprints visualize Issues, Priorities and Points for Debate in notes posted on meeting room walls.

This article describes the Agile concepts that make a digital Transformation Sprint a potent addition to innovation practice.

The purpose of this paper is to present an innovative agile methodology that proposes fundamental changes in managing the development of in-house information systems in small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and benchmarks it with one of two database technologies enabling these systems to be both efficient and competitive.

The objectives are achieved by presenting an elaborated design of the agile methodology that manages the system development process by addressing three basic components: roles played by system players, process needed to fulfill the system development, and artifacts to document the project. A case study is conducted as a proof of the effectiveness of the proposed methodology and measures whether the selection of the database technology affects the effectiveness of the system development process.

Results show that, compared with traditional methodologies, the proposed methodology reduced the cost of system development and testing by 30 percent and enhanced the IT – business alliance. Further, this work found that the selection of a suitable database technology is strongly related to the complexity and interrelationships between the data used.

Such research did not receive the needed attention (Hunter, 2004) even in the past decade. Successful adoption of IT by companies could be in the form of customized IS which could be expensive for SMEs to adopt due to a lack in technical expertise and financial resources. The proposed methodology has the potential to promote sustainable development through helping SMEs in reducing the time and cost of IT project development.