Hybrid Approaches of Verbal Decision Analysis in the Selection of Project Management Approaches

AbstractDecision support methods aim at assisting in the decision-making process by simplifying the analysis of the problem and justifying the choice of a particular potential action. Recent researches have shown that the hybridization of methods is able to overcome limitations presented by the methods when applied separately: the classification of alternatives before submitting them to an ordination methodology would be an e ective way of filtering the set to be ordered. Specific Practices of Capability Maturity Model Integration were analyzed through a decision making model, assisted by the methods SAC and ZAPROS III-i. The results will be compared to previous studies

Key Factors for Selecting an Agile Method: A Systematic Literature Review

Agile methods have become popular in recent years because the success rate of project development using Agile methods is better than structured design methods. Nevertheless, less than 50 percent of projects implemented using Agile methods are considered successful, and selecting the wrong Agile method is one of the reasons for project failure. Selecting the most appropriate Agile method is a challenging task because there are so many to choose from. In addition, potential adopters believe that migrating to an Agile method involves taking a drastic risk. Therefore, to assist project managers and other decision makers, this study aims to identify the key factors that should be considered when selecting an appropriate Agile method. A systematic literature review was performed to elicit these factors in an unbiased manner and then content analysis was used to analyze the resultant data. It was found that the nature of project, development team skills, project constraints, customer involvement and organizational culture are the key factors that should guide decision makers in the selection of an appropriate Agile method based on the value these factors have for different organizations and/or different projects

Effective Communication in Globally Distributed Scrum: A Model and Practical Guidance

A trend in information systems development is for globally distributed teams to use agile methods and frameworks such as Scrum. In globally distributed (GD) software development, a known challenge is effective team communication. Researchers, however, cannot evaluate effective communication in GD teams using Scrum unless they know what effective communication means in that context. This qualitative study contributes a theoretical model of effective communication in GD Scrum teams and practical guidance for practitioners. Ten industry professionals working in GD Scrum teams were interviewed to capture their understanding of effective communication. Qualitative content analysis was used to analyse the interviews and form a basis for the model and the practical guidance. This novel model consists of communication transparency, communication quality, and communication discipline, which together lead to the alignment of team understanding (i.e., a team-level shared mental model). This theoretical model lays the ground for future research into the effect of Scrum practices on communication in GD contexts, and the effect of communication on team and project success. For practitioners, this study contributes 11 practical actions that professionals recommend for improving and sustaining effective communication

Communication, culture, competency, and stakeholder that contribute to requirement elicitation effectiveness

In the context of software development, requirement engineering is one of the crucial phases that leads to software project success or failure. According to several disruptive changes in the software engineering landscape as well as the world’s challenge of virus pandemic, the provision of practical and innovative software applications is required. Therefore, issues resolution in requirement elicitation is potentially one of the key success factors resulting in enhanced quality of system requirement. The authors have striven to create new ways of requirement elicitation according to factor effects of communication, culture, competency, and stakeholder, by incorporating tools, processes, methods, and techniques to solve the problems comprehensively, and then proposed an adaptive and applicable conceptual framework. To illustrate these effects, the authors performed a literature review from the past 8 years, and then data analysis from interviews of 27 practitioners, observations and focus groups of software development in real-life projects

Social conduct, learning and innovation: an abductive study of the dark side of agile software development

Agile methodologies have been adopted by an increasing number of organizations to improve their responsiveness. However, few studies have empirically analysed the effect of Agile on long-term organizational goals such as learning and innovation. Using an abductive approach, this study examines the relationships between self-regulated teams’ social conduct and their resulting learning and innovation. Results indicate that the perceived time pressure to get the job done greatly impedes team engagement in learning and innovation activities. Time pressure is affected by the various control strategies deriving from the implementation of Agile, which constitute its dark side: concertive, belief, diagnostic and boundary controls

The Project Manager “Language” in a Crisis Scenario

A pandemic scenario may add time and space limits to the relationships that exist between people and businesses. It is reasonable to assume that multiple projects are conditioned by those limitations. As a result, they should follow the same constraints. Two fundamental views that project managers should focus on during the management of projects are the technical-operative modalities they use to advance the activities and their mindset to manage their dynamics. The union of these two dimensions can be regarded as the “language” of project managers. This paper focuses on analyzing the impacts of pandemics on these dimensions and the ways through which these conditions could change the “language” to properly react to this kind of crisis. As argued here, the variables of “triad” (Reaction-ExecutionResults) combined with an appropriate mindset and the usage of a micro-goal approach could be an effective reply to a pandemic

Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming: 18th International Conference, XP 2017, Cologne, Germany, May 22-26, 2017, Proceedings

agile software development; lean development; scrum; project management; software developmen

Fit to Context Matters – Selecting and Using Information Systems Development Methods to Develop Business in Digitalization Contexts

We ponder the relations of software, information systems (IS) and business development methods in the development of digital businesses and in the digitalization of extant businesses. We present our published IS development method (ISDM) framework and its development. The framework is used as the background to reason the relations between the three development layers of digitalization: software, IS and business. We then propose six highly potential areas of future research. In addition, we answer to two research questions also paving the way to future research: is the matching of IS and business development a reasonable proposition, and is the finding of extant literature true, according to which ISDMs are used limitedly in IS development work. We organized two workshops with 21 (14+7) participants to answer these questions. We detected yes and mixed answers. We contribute to research with the empirical findings and the proposed research areas

A Wheelbarrow Full of Frogs: Understanding Portfolio Management for Agile Projects

Organizations increasingly embrace agile approaches for IT projects, replacing rigid formal stage-gate control by flexible output-orientation. This challenges established program or portfolio management approaches that largely rely on consolidated (stage-gate) project metrics. Based on seven case studies of large Dutch organizations we explore these challenges and the organizational responses towards a new approach to portfolio management for agile projects. Data-collection is guided by four propositions derived from control theory and portfolio management literature. Our findings show that portfolio management adapts to agile projects by performing fewer and less strict process controls, by modifying the budget controls and by shifting from IT project/program control to business outcome control, with an increased focus on business value