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

Agile portfolio management: An empirical perspective on the practice in use

Abstract Agile project management methods revolutionized the way how software projects are executed and organized. The question, however, on how to enable agility outside of individual projects and help larger organizations to compete with small entrepreneurial companies requires further attention. As a possible perspective, project portfolio management provides a global view on resources and their distribution across individual projects according to strategic choices. Based on 30 interviews conducted in 14 large European organizations this study contributes to the understanding of agile project management methods applied in IT project portfolios. First, we empirically identify the domains of practice. Then, guided by literature and our data we discuss the characteristics and implications of the agile portfolio management practice in our case organizations

The corporate entrepreneur

Corporate entrepreneurship is one tool for established companies to strengthen their capabilities for strategic renewal and innovativeness. The question, however, which factors are influencing the success of a corporate entrepreneurship initiative requires further attention. The corporate entrepreneur who is acting as both the leader of embedded entrepreneurial teams and linking pin to the corporate, is providing one possible perspective. Based on 6 interviews conducted in 6 German organizations this study contributes to the understanding of the role of the corporate entrepreneur and how this role can be distinguished from other roles in the context of innovation

Innovation Labs

Today's increasing pace of change and intense competition places demands on organizations to use a different approach to innovation, going beyond the incremental innovation that is typically developed within the core of the organization. As an option to escape the existing beliefs of the core organization, innovation labs are used to develop more discontinuous innovation. Despite the abundance of these so-called innovation labs in practice, researchers have devoted little effort to scrutinizing the concept and to provide managers with a framework for exploiting this form of innovation. In this paper, we aim to perform an empirical investigation and to create a consensus around the concept of innovation labs. To do so, we conducted a multiple case study in large international organizations with a total of 31 interviews of an average length of 70 minutes. We offer a framework by identifying four innovation lab types and consider when each is most appropriate. Furthermore, we highlight the importance for managers and their organizations to align the strategic intent with the innovation lab type as well as the interface between the innovation lab and the core business

Inter-team Coordination in Large-Scale Agile Development: A Case Study of Three Enabling Mechanisms

Agile methods are increasingly used in large development projects, with multiple development teams. A central question is then what is needed to coordinate feature teams efficiently. This study exam- ines three mechanisms for coordination: Shared mental models, commu- nication and trust in a large-scale development project with 12 feature teams running over a four-year period. We analyse the findings in rela- tion to suggested frameworks for large-scale agile development and a theory on coordination, and provide new recommendations for practice and theory