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The creative industries are facing tremendous changes due to fast development of new technologies, new stakeholder structures, more complex governance and a continuous demand for content due to new distribution channels. Despite these drastic changes, the creative industries want and need to preserve their cultural heritage to overcome volatility. A potential way for the creative industry to face these changes may be to transform creative projects towards agile project management. Due to the popularity and success of agility in project management in software domains, extant research details the benefits and challenges of agility and agile methods, but we lack a comprehensive picture of a possible integration of agility in creative industries. Therefore, this paper systematically reviews the literature on agility and agile methods in the creative industries and develops a framework that focuses particularly on the audiovisual industries such as motion picture, music, mobile and video gaming industry. Based on our framework, we identified eleven specific drivers of agile project management for the creative industries within our 31 paper. Overall, our results identify a significant potential for future research on agile project management in creative industries and emphasize agility as an ‘accelerator’ of transformation.

In the course of continuous volatility like production stops due to COVID-19 pandemic, video-on-demand player monopolize the film industry, while filmmakers are stuck in traditional, linear content development processes. The traditional film industry has to become more agile in order to react quickly and easily to unexpected changes and competitive pressure. Despite the benefits of agility demonstrated in software development and successfully integrated agility into project management, the adaptation in creative industries such as content development for film production have largely been neglected. To determine the potential value for agility in the film industry, we build on theory about agile project management and examine in an online survey with 184 German filmmakers (producers, authors, directors, actors, film financiers), if the Agile Manifesto values and principles from the Software Development can be adapted to the film industry. Based on our data, we validated the agile manifesto for the film industry with content development specific four values related to nine own principles. Our results show that it is crucial to digitalize traditional content development to agile content development end-to-end, with digital tools, lean processes, new collaboration structures and holacracy to prepare for any volatility. Our findings help to get a better understanding of the agile manifesto beyond the Software Development as a guideline for implementing agility in the Film Industry.