The role of the IT-Project Manager in Organizations that Balance Agile and Traditional Software Development

Systems development practice is undergoing major transformation, as many companies try to improve their practice to become more flexible, adaptable and agile. However, research provides convincing evidence that it may be difficult to become agile or even just to integrate agile processes in existing companies that are dominated by traditional practice. A recent literature study concludes that most literature and practice advice to reconcile the traditional approaches with agility. The complexity added by having and combining two “worlds” thwarts the job of IT project managers and change their role. Understanding these changes and the new role is the focal point of this work. Through a focused literature review, types of balancing are found, and motives, opportunities and challenges of balancing are mapped. Based on this work a framework of IT project managers’ role in organizations that balance agile and traditional approaches is suggested

Five Principles for Digital Service Innovation in Social Care

Digitalization in the public sector is growing to also include areas such as social care. We investigate the digital service innovation process within home care services in a Danish municipality. Inspired by theory on social materiality, we argue for an approach to digital service innovation within social care as an ongoing and entangled development of human and technological resources. We take an abductive approach as we combine theory on social-materiality and digital service innovation with empirical insights. Based in this, we propose five principles of importance for successful digital service innovation in social care: 1) mutual adaption; 2) piloting; 3) empowered; 4) situated re-innovation, and 5) continuous innovation.Â

Improving Agile Software Practice

Abstract. Software process improvement in small and agile organizations is often problematic, but achieving good SPI-assessments can still be necessary to stay in the marked or to meet demands of multinational owners. The traditional norm driven, centralized and control centered improvement approaches has been reported ineffective in small firms and a lot of research is done to find more suitable improvement approaches. Only very few of these alternative approaches breaks with the underlying values of a rational system development process that seems to fit so badly. But is it at all possible to stay agile and innovative, while striving for certification according to traditional rational SPI norms? This paper reports from a action research project in a small agile Danish firm (Techsoft) conducting a improvement initiative. The firm had just been met by the demand for a CMMI level-3 certification from their new multinational owners. In the project we experimented to reach a less centralized and control centered SPI approach trying to meet the agile culture of the firm both within diagnosing, improvement planning, process design and evaluation eventhough the goal was applying to the norm. After having chosen the improvement area; requirement management, a more formal culture assessment and comparisons with the culture of the CMM-norm helped guiding the design of the new processes and tools. The paper suggests a SPI-approach based on problem diagnosis instead of formal CMMI-assessment, culture analysis to support designing processes that balance the firm-culture with that of the CMM-model and achieving real change in practice by building commitment and engagement through participative SPI-planning and design.