Coexisting Plan-driven and Agile Methods: How Tensions Emerge and Are Resolved

Fast changing products, processes, and services caused by digital technologies require organizations to adopt agile methods after having used plan-driven approaches for decades. Adopting agile methods only to software development, can lead to a challenging coexistence of methods. To date, little empirical understanding exists with regard to the difficulties that emerge when organizations introduce agile teams in plan-driven environments. Consequently, we investigate the coexistence of agile and plan-driven methods and study its impacts. We conducted an exploratory multiple case study of four organizations and draw from adaptive structuration theory to study how agile methods are adopted on team level to an environment of deeply entrenched plan-driven methods. We find that this coexistence causes several tensions between agile and plan-driven teams (i.e., budgeting, knowledge, planning, process, responsibility, and cultural tension). Further, we reveal how organizations and teams overcome these tensions with balanced and blended resolutions

Hybrid Agile Approach: Efficiently Blending Traditional and Agile Methodologies

Agile development, in its simplest form, offers a lightweight framework for helping teams, given a constantly evolving functional and technical landscape, maintain a focus on the rapid delivery of business value. Traditional project management focuses more on distinct and predefined sequential phases. It assumes that once requirements are fixed there won’t be any changes or additions in future. In today’s world however this is not true and development teams have to incorporate changes at later stages to be competitive. This is where agile methodologies have an edge over traditional methods. Agile can handle more complex and highly adaptable projects. However, organizations focusing heavily on traditional methodologies like waterfall may find completely switching to agile potentially risky. Agile methods may have these major potential risks like agile methods are easy to misunderstand, highly visible information can be threat to financially sensitive projects. Therefore, many companies fear the adoption of Agile because an enterprise-wide adoption of the methodology will conflict with the traditional Waterfall process and create conflict. Hybrid Agile approach will help the organizations transition to agile efficiently. This paper will focus on the analyzing the successful combination of agile and traditional methodology

Сучасний підхід у навчанні управління проектами для IT-спеціалістів

The modern world is not thinking without information technology. Training specialists not only fluent in IT technologies, but also those who know how to manage people and resources, is one of the main tasks of the IT university. This article focuses on teaching project management for IT students. The course covers the necessary set of knowledge and skills required for IT project managers. The main goal of the course is to teach students to focus on the organizational and managerial aspects of program projects. Along with various methods of project management (planning, budgeting and risk analysis), the main project management tools are considered; leadership principles; customer relations; liability issues; intellectual property issues; privacy issues. The article discusses the modern approach to teaching as a blended learning technology. This approach, combining traditional forms of education with elements of e-learning, is well applicable for a project management course. The features of the teaching of this course presented in the article are based on the personal responsibility of students for their own learning results. This also includes training based on mastery, an environment of high achievements, learning by doing. Actual methods in education as learning by doing, inverted learning and gamification are considered. The work also highlighted the role of “Project Management” in the student’s general educational trajectory. In addition, the article presents the experience of implementing and teaching this course at the International University of Information Technologies. The Project Management course is one of 12 courses in the Software Development Program (SDP) cycle, presented by iCarnegie.Сучасний світ неможливо уявити без інформаційних технологій. Підготовка фахівців, які не тільки вільно володіють ІТ технологіями, але і вміють управляти людьми і ресурсами одна з основних задач ІТ університету. Дана стаття присвячена методиці викладання курсу з управління проектами для ІТ-студентів. Курс покриває необхідний набір знань і навичок, необхідних для управлінців ІТ проектами. Основна мета курсу - навчити студентів зосередитися на організаційних і управлінських аспектах програмних проектів. Поряд з різними методами управління проектами (планування, бюджетування та аналіз ризиків) розглядаються основні інструменти управління проектами: принципи лідерства, відносини з клієнтами, питання відповідальності, питання інтелектуальної власності, питання конфіденційності. У статті обговорюється сучасний підхід у викладанні, а саме технології змішаного навчання. Даний підхід, поєднуючи традиційні форми навчання з елементами електронного навчання, може бути застосованим для курсу з управління проектами. Представлені в статті особливості викладання зазначеного курсу засновані на особистої відповідальності учнів за власні навчальні результати. Сюди ж можна віднести навчання, засноване на майстерності, середу високих досягнень, навчання на власному досвіді. Розглянуто актуальні методи в освіті, такі як навчання на практиці, перевернуте навчання і гейміфікація. В роботі також підкреслена роль «Управління проектами» в загальній освітній траєкторії студента. Крім того, в статті представлений досвід впровадження і викладання даного курсу в Міжнародному університеті інформаційних технологій. Курс «Управління проектами» є одним з 12 курсів циклу Програми розробки програмного забезпечення (SDP), представлених компанією iCarnegie

CO2N: Let's Convert!.

This projects aims to building a Website to support individuals, families, companies and other organizations in the transition towards a CO2 neutral way of living and working/producing. To this end, the site will contain a footprint calculator for CO2 emissions as well as tools to provide users with tips, advices, donations and feedback. It will also be possible to certify if a company is CO2 neutral and allow them to use a logo/stamp that they can add to their products. This project is developed under the BlendED AIM framework and with a team of 7 students from all over Europe. (4 IT, 2 Design, 1 Marketing).<br /

Task 10: Research an Alternative Instructional Design Model

Under authority of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the Center of Excellence (COE) Technical Training Human Performance (TTHP) Task 10 research team has prepared a comprehensive technical report and an executive summary for the Air Traffic Organization (ATO) concerning the instructional development (ID) of occupational education and training for Air Traffic (AT) controllers and Technical Operations (TO) technicians. Research included: • Front-end analysis of available FAA courses and government furnished information (GFI), including course-development documentation and associated guidance, policies, and regulations. • Structured and semi-structured data-gathering techniques in cooperation with Instructional Systems Specialists (ISS), ISS Managers, and Requirements personnel. • Informal observations of validation events for Air Traffic training. • Analysis of the relevant literature from academic, government, and industry domains. The executive summary describes the findings and observations of issues directly related to the ID process and potential solutions based on findings from this comparative analysis. The comprehensive report that follows includes these and additional observations and recommendations as well as the project overview, an introduction to best practice research, the research methodology, presentation and analysis of the results, and discussion of the findings and conclusions

Scrum Abandonment in Distributed Teams: A Revelatory Case

The last decade has witnessed substantial growth in the adoption of both Agile and distributed software development. However, combining Agile practices, which emphasize regular informal communication, with geographically and temporally distributed sites, which hinder regular informal communication, presents numerous challenges. Proponents of Agile, especially the Scrum project management framework, have published several case studies of successful Scrum implementations in distributed environments. However, few empirical studies examine failed or abandoned Scrum implementations. Consequently, this paper presents a revelatory case study of a geographically and temporally distributed software development team that abandoned its attempted transition to Scrum. Two factors associated with the team’s decision to abandon Scrum are identified – degradation of Scrum practices due to distribution and the undermining of the ScrumMaster’s credibility. Based on this analysis the paper proposes that task/team familiarity, group cohesion and transactive memory may be combined to understand the relationship between geotemporal distribution, process and performance

Understanding the Structure of Agile Software Development Using Text Analytics: A Preliminary Analysis

The tenets of agile software development (ASD) were formulated over fifteen years ago. Since then, a number of methods and best practices have emerged, which, in turn, have spawned many research ideas. This study attempts to chronicle the evolution of thought in agile software development by using text analytics, an approach that is becoming invaluable in our efforts to understand unstructured text. Specifically, we use text analytics to unravel latent semantic relationships within the agile domain in order to get a sense of where we started, where we are today, and what to anticipate in the future

Project Management in Engineering Education: Providing Generation Z With Transferable Skills

Expository approaches in project management education do not seem to be engaging engineering students. Although the students acquire remarkable theoretical knowledge throughout their coursework, they lack transferable competences, such as soft skills, which are scarcely attended in the teaching of project management. Generation Z's characteristics differ from previous generations and should be considered in new project management education approaches and methods. This article reviews the project management competencies, Generation Z profile, and teaching methods trends reported in the literature. It presents a study involving 147 engineering students, through a self-report questionnaire, to explore their profile's self-awareness and compare it with the literature. A correlational study links the Generation Z's personality traits with project management soft skills. Findings reveal interesting personality characteristics of Generation Z engineering students for the project management field. However, this sample showed low recognition of their individualism, less personal relationships, and did not value their creative potential. There were also differences in Electronic, Electrical, and Computer Science engineering students, namely, lower emotional intelligence. Some highlighted traits have a significant effect on critical project management soft skills. Other soft skills were not supported in personality traits. This work suggests implications for re-think educational approaches to Generation Z engineering students.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Mobile App Prototype for Course Management in Secondary Education

In the last decade, mobile applications have shown an expansion to a great diversity of uses that can be made, which has influenced at different levels (economic, cultural, political), as in the area of learning where it has played a very important role in learning, since now with the development of technologies, children and adolescents are very interested in these new technologies and it is easier for them to use them, which also supports them in learning a great diversity of subjects of their own interest. That is why in this work a prototype of a mobile application for the management of mobile education using the Scrum methodology at the Norbert Wiener University of Lima-Peru, knowing that there are learning problems in students in the classroom, for this, want to provide a mobile application that supports the student to improve their learning. As a result, obtained from the study, was a prototype of a mobile application to improve learning in the Monte Carmelo private school in Lima-Peru, where a virtual model of the mobile application is shown, register the user, login where you can view their classes and share their class assignments, facilitating the user to enter their class and study material, this was achieved using balsamiq, the Scrum methodology with its four phases. The results of the survey conducted to the experts show that in most of the questions they gave a high scale, with the highest average of 4.91 with a standard deviation of 0.302 and only one low scale obtained of 1.45 on average with a standard deviation of 0.52