People over process: the implications of agile for IS skills and human resource management

Agile approaches to information systems development have become increasingly popular in recent years, as more and more IS organisations are eager to capitalise on the alleged opportunities and benefits they provide. However, transition to these approaches is often far from trivial, and can be extremely problematic. Our study of 20 organisations will focus on the skill gaps caused by the emergence of agile and will identify the top ten key distinctive skills required in an agile environment. Our study will also identify the major strategic human resource challenges and practices to address skill needs and career development in today’s agile environments e.g. recruitment, training and performance evaluation. Particular emphasis will be placed on the distinctive implications of global, and thus distributed, systems development on these challenges. This will be particularly relevant in the coming years as agile approaches cross the chasm from small, co-located project teams to large-scale, multiorganisation, multi-site development across many countries and time zones

Losing the plot: decision behaviours in agile systems development

The importance of effective decision making in organisations has been well documented. Groups are often formed in order to collaborate skills and information and assist with decision-making. Despite the many benefits associated with groupwork, groups are also subjected to process losses such as groupthink, which in turn have a significant impact on group decision-making. Such process losses may be even more prevalent in agile software development dominated by highly cohesive, self-managing teams. The purpose of this study is to investigate group decision-making in agile software development and assess how agile practices can reduce the occurrence of group process losses

People over process: key people challenges in agile development

There is a common perception that, while there may be some ‘teething’ problems experienced during the initial transition to agile, people are much happier, engaged and ultimately more productive in these environments. This study shows that this belief may not always hold true, identifying many serious ‘people’ challenges experienced by 17 large multinational organisations, all using agile for more than three years. The cases provide an interesting insight in that they involve cases where agile was implemented in a top-down manner across the organisations or at least across business units. This is in contrast to most accounts of agile which involve voluntary, bottom up adoption on small co-located teams developing systems deemed to be suitable for agile development. The people issues uncovered include a broad range of problems from recruitment of agile staff, to training, motivation and performance evaluation among others. The paper will conclude with a set of actionable recommendations as to how organisations can overcome these challenges, based on the better practices uncovered in the cases studied