An agile business process and practice meta-model

Business Process Management (BPM) encompasses the discovery, modelling, monitoring, analysis and improvement of business processes. Limitations of traditional BPM approaches in addressing changes in business requirements have resulted in a number of agile BPM approaches that seek to accelerate the redesign of business process models. Meta-models are a key BPM feature that reduce the ambiguity of business process models. This paper describes a meta-model supporting the agile version of the Business Process and Practice Alignment Methodology (BPPAM) for business process improvement, which captures process information from actual work practices. The ability of the meta-model to achieve business process agility is discussed and compared with other agile meta-models, based on definitions of business process flexibility and agility found in the literature. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V

Non-Technical Individual Skills are Weakly Connected to the Maturity of Agile Practices

Context: Existing knowledge in agile software development suggests that individual competency (e.g. skills) is a critical success factor for agile projects. While assuming that technical skills are important for every kind of software development project, many researchers suggest that non-technical individual skills are especially important in agile software development. Objective: In this paper, we investigate whether non-technical individual skills can predict the use of agile practices. Method: Through creating a set of multiple linear regression models using a total of 113 participants from agile teams in six software development organizations from The Netherlands and Brazil, we analyzed the predictive power of non-technical individual skills in relation to agile practices. Results: The results show that there is surprisingly low power in using non-technical individual skills to predict (i.e. explain variance in) the mature use of agile practices in software development. Conclusions: Therefore, we conclude that looking at non-technical individual skills is not the optimal level of analysis when trying to understand, and explain, the mature use of agile practices in the software development context. We argue that it is more important to focus on the non-technical skills as a team-level capacity instead of assuring that all individuals possess such skills when understanding the use of the agile practices.Comment: 18 pages, 1 figur

Designing distribution centres for agile supply chains

Increasing globalisation and market volatility represent major challenges for many supply chains, and particularly for the distribution centres within them. This paper examines how distribution centres are being designed to be agile even though they are, by their nature, long-term fixed assets. The research is based on semi-structured interviews with warehouse design companies to identify the range of agility types that were regarded as necessary during the design phase, and how these were addressed. The research also explores the cost, time and service level implications, whilst handling variances in demand or supply. The interviewee responses are expressed in terms of qualitative measures on Likert scales. The results indicate that there is generally a slightly or moderately higher cost to design for agility. Based on the literature and the case study responses, a methodology is developed of how to address agility within warehouse design, and areas of further research are identified

An agile business process improvement methodology

Adoption of business process improvement strategies are now a concern of most organisations. Organisations are still facing challenges and finding transient solutions to immediate problems. The misalignment between IT solutions and organisational aspects evolves across space and time showing discrepancies. Unfortunately, existing business process approaches are not according with continuous business process improvement involving business stakeholders. Considering this limitation in well-known Business Process (BP) methodologies, this paper presents a comparative study of some approaches and introduces agility in the Business Process and Practice Alignment Methodology (BPPAM). Our intention is to present observed problems in existing approaches and introduce agility in our proposal to address features, like the alignment between daily work practices and business process descriptions, in a simple and agile way. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V

Agile methods for agile universities

We explore a term, Agile, that is being used in various workplace settings, including the management of universities. The term may have several related but slightly different meanings. Agile is often used in the context of facilitating more creative problem-solving and advocating for the adoption, design, tailoring and continual updating of more innovative organizational processes. We consider a particular set of meanings of the term from the world of software development. Agile methods were created to address certain problems with the software development process. Many of those problems have interesting analogues in the context of universities, so a reflection on agile methods may be a useful heuristic for generating ideas for enabling universities to be more creative

Hybrid Software Development Approaches in Practice: A European Perspective

Agile and traditional development approaches are used in combination in todays software development. To improve the understanding and to provide better guidance for selecting appropriate development approaches, it is important to analyze such combinations in practice. Results obtained from an online survey strongly confirm that hybrid development approaches are widely used in industry. Our results show that hybrid development approaches: (i) have become reality for nearly all companies; (ii) are applied to specific projects even in the presence of company-wide policies for process usage; (iii) are neither planned nor designed but emerge from the evolution of different work practices; and, (iv) are consistently used regardless of company size or industry secto

Integrated Approach for Developing Agile Strategy

Thep rojectl ooksa t Agility andA gile manufacturingin particular,w ith a focuso n the SME type businessT. he initial focus is on the developmenot f the ASF (Agile Strategic Framework) to make the selection of tools and techniques for manufacturing environments automated and systematised. This is to give consistency of approach, repeatability and to develop the system automation potential. This work will produce a test type model of how the business environment audit tool can be automated to produce results quickly and easily with less human time and intervention. One part of the ASF which needs particular development is the process of examining a company strategy from an agility type perspective. The project fills this niche by looking at how agility fits with traditional schools of strategy, how it relates to definitions of agility from content analysis and pulls these together. Using grounded theory and qualitative methods to examine the meanings, usage and context of Agility an examination of how this may relate to TRIZ type systems using agility paradigms is undcrtaken. This particular study relates to agility in a large context including software, construction and business processes as well as manufacturing definitions. A working model with Case Study examples is suggested as a point for further development