Autonomous agile teams: Challenges and future directions for research

According to the principles articulated in the agile manifesto, motivated and empowered software developers relying on technical excellence and simple designs, create business value by delivering working software to users at regular short intervals. These principles have spawned many practices. At the core of these practices is the idea of autonomous, self-managing, or self-organizing teams whose members work at a pace that sustains their creativity and productivity. This article summarizes the main challenges faced when implementing autonomous teams and the topics and research questions that future research should address

HOW AGILE IS YOUR IT DEPARTMENT? – DEVELOPMENT AND APPLICATION OF AN FRAMEWORK-INDEPENDENT AGILE SCALING MATURITY MODEL

Many IT departments seek to capitalize on the benefits of agile development by scaling agile practices. To manage the complex scaling, established approaches and frameworks promise guidance. However, although existing works envision a clear target state, they lack relevant capabilities along the scaling process, especially for vertical agile scaling. Managers need these capabilities to assess their company’s status quo and develop a clear scaling roadmap. Thus, within this work, we use the Design Science Research paradigm to build and evaluate a framework-independent agile scaling maturity model that provides management with a tool for ex-ante identification and evaluation of agile scaling capabilities in five maturity stages. To evaluate our model, we applied it at KUKA IT, the IT department of an international provider of automation solutions. As a result, this work provides insights into the application and outlines how IT departments can operationalize and utilize our model to guide agile scaling

Self-Organizing Agile Teams: A Grounded Theory

Self-organizing teams are a hallmark of Agile software development, directly a ecting team e ectiveness and project success. Agile software development, and in particular the Scrum method, emphasizes self-organizing teams but does not provide clear guidelines on how teams should become and remain self-organizing. Based on Grounded Theory research involving 58 Agile prac- titioners from 23 di erent software organizations in New Zealand and In- dia, this thesis presents a grounded theory of self-organizing Agile teams. The theory of self-organizing Agile teams explains how software development teams take on informal, implicit, transient, and spontaneous roles and per- form balanced practices while facing critical environmental factors, in order to become self-organizing. The roles are: Mentor, Co-ordinator, Translator, Champion, Promoter, and Terminator. The practices involve balancing free- dom and responsibility, cross-functionality and specialization, and continuous learning and iteration pressure. The factors are senior management support and level of customer involvement. This thesis will help teams and their coaches better understand their roles and responsibilities as a self-organizing Agile team. This thesis will also serve to educate senior management and customers about the importance of supporting these team

Finnish Enterprise Agile Transformations : A Survey Study

Peer reviewe

Management innovation made in China: Haier’s Rendanheyi

This article shows how emerging market companies like China’s Haier Group create management innovations that are appropriate for an environment characterized by increased volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA). Dealing with VUCA effectively requires practices favoring nimble and decentralized responses; the Haier Group developed a platform of management practices under the label Rendanheyi (in Chinese: 人单合一) to transform itself from a conventional hierarchical manufacturing firm into a highly responsive online-based entrepreneurial company with “zero distance to the customer”. We demonstrate how the organizational, competitive, institutional, and technological contexts mattered for the development of Rendanheyi. Our study contributes several insights for practitioners and academics. First, we showcase how context dependent management innovations are created to allow emerging market firms like Haier to deal with a high VUCA world. Second, we draw lessons from Haier’s experimentation process for other firms. Finally, we create an extended process model of management innovation that managers, in both emerging and developed countries, can readily apply