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Agile methodology for software development and IT projects has developed into more complex, hybrid project management frameworks – notably the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). This allows the agile management of complex IT portfolios or development programmes which require methodology which goes beyond the single-project-single-team scope of e.g. the basic Scrum approach. The SAFe methodology claims to be the right approach for lean enterprises. But this still assumes that it is implemented in a single organization with stable organizational setups and team structures and with professional staff. In contrast, we apply SAFe in a typical distributed and loose environment of an Open Source development project. Instead of a dedicated team, the involved staff is organized in an informal, open community of practice (OpenCoP) where participants join and leave and where staff contributes only certain amounts of time with a limited commitment. In addition, we deal with a university led IT programme which involves students as developers with limited experience and competence in professional project work. This paper presents the case study of the development of a Digital Education Ecosystem (DEE) for a Virtual Master School. The members of this Master School (including the students) are the co-developers and the users of the DEE. They form an OpenCoP which develops a customized IT system for their own needs. Applying SAFe in such an environment is new and challenging. This paper describes first experiences in this field.

This chapter seeks to explore the role of organizational culture in employing design thinking as an agile management tool and to reflect upon the benefits and challenges of doing so. The authors highlight the issue that the most difficult underlying task if design thinking is to succeed is to organize for self-organization and show that design thinking cannot be employed successfully if the organizational culture does not allow for such an agile management approach. Such a managerial approach is also most likely to be contingent upon an appropriate organizational culture. The chapter thus posits that the ‘one size fits all’ premise in terms of design thinking is unlikely to hold true in managerial practice.

Banking 4.0 is characterised by digital innovations, fusing the physical, artificial, and biological worlds, affecting societies, industries, and companies with ever higher speed and intensity. In the process to a new world order with new competitive forces and uncertainty, where goals are continually changing, and resources must be flexibly reorganised, there is no room for traditional ways of strategic thinking. With old management concepts, linear value chains, and rigid and closed organisational structures, established firms will be the losers. This article explains why the banking industry is ripe for disruption. It introduces a conceptual framework based on a case study research of Chinese juggernauts, including value constellations, platform business models and super-apps. Our journey from the industrial economy to the digital era opens up new vistas on how to create and capture value for businesses and clients of the next generation. We describe why modern leaders must embrace change, learn from Asia, and develop strategies through the lens of the ecosystem theory. Digital ecosystems focus on clients and data and consolidate interconnected goods and services. To achieve sustainable financial growth, we suggest an agile management approach that takes the digital transformation as a chance and builds upon partnerships to connect with diverse actors—technologically, socially, and culturally.

New management approaches emerging in the discussion about work 4.0 are closely linked to the debates about VUCA and agility. Agile frameworks are quite successful and the call for an “agile organization” is meanwhile heard virtually everywhere. An important step on the way to agile organizations is on the one hand seen in “Agile Scaling”—the transfer of agile approaches from isolated teams to the organization as a whole. On the other hand, companies increasingly try to actively create their “business ecosystem”. Both agile ideas provide changes and risks for all stakeholders and are challenged by historically grown bureaucratic and hierarchical structures. This chapter argues that active management of contradictions is necessary and provides insights into core principles for agile management of contradictions.

One of the contemporary demands on large industrial organizations, and one that significantly impacts the work of engineering managers, is sustainability reporting, i.e., the process through which organizations give an account of their sustainability indicators and practices. However, gathering the necessary information to provide evidence of how an organization addresses economic, social, and environmental issues, is no simple task. Diversity of information sources, available in different formats, from different areas, by different people and for different purposes all pose challenges. Additionally, sustainability reporting is a routine demand, usually performed every year, hence a process that must be continuously improved. This work aims to address these challenges by applying an architecture-oriented agile approach to the problem. The architecture-orientation helps to determine the necessary requirements to be met and establishes a baseline from which to improve the process by linking the necessary information to its sources (e.g., processes, areas, departments, people, information systems, and suppliers). The agile approach helps to define incremental improvements according to organizational priorities, focusing on having, at all moments, and actionable process. A case study of an organization—automobile industry—that publishes a sustainability report according to the Standards of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) is shown to illustrate the approach and provide insights on how it assists in improving this process.

Context: Organizations start understanding the need to become an agile organization in order to fully benefit from agility and be competitive on quickly changing markets. Leaders at every level, not just top managers, need to buy into agility as an organizational value. Since the mid 1990s, many software development teams have very successfully adopted agile methods and proved that they can deal with continuous change. However, it is not clear how agility looks like outside the software development department on the organizational level. Objectives: The aim of this work is to create a better understanding on what leadership and management can look like in the context of an agile organization. We focused our work on scientific papers to build a scientific overview as starting point for future research. Method: We conducted a systematic literature review to identify the existing scientific literature on leadership and management approaches in the context of agile on the organizational level. Results: We provide an overview of existing work on this topic. The analysis of the identified papers focused on the definition of and motivation for agile leadership and agile management. Conclusion: Practitioners can use the results for improvement, while researchers can build on the results to help companies with their agile transformation.

The article discusses which central importance is attached to reflection and reflection competence based on current discussions about and the use of agile management methods. The focus is on the implementation of instruments to promote innovation and improve quality. In this context, the different forms of organizational cultures play a determining role. Against this background, the results of an empirical study as well as the structural model of economic didactics, economic didactic conclusions for the promotion of reflection competence are worked out regarding teaching and learning objectives, topic, methodology, addressee system and teaching and learning control.

Agile Project Management is an iterative approach to planning and guiding project processes. It is suited for large complex projects where it is difficult to specify the product in advance. This thesis has focused on what opportunities there might be in implementing the Agile project management approach on the basis of Scrumban method in the residential building construction. The major advantages found with implementing the Scrumban approach is an improve productivity and resource allocation. The Scrumban approach almost forces the client to increase their participation in the project compared to the situation today. By the use of time management and specific meetings it will also be beneficial for keeping track of the project’s progression and status. This project intends to create a methodology for improvement of residential building construction by Agile management software.

Safety-critical systems (SCSs) are distributed in many areas such as flight, railway, medical, nuclear and defense, and failure of these systems can harm human life or damage the environment. There are several ways to reduce or possibly eliminate failure, according to researchers improving the development processes of SCSs reduces failure by 40%. Therefore, developers have invented many development methods and measurement techniques to reduce failures during development processes. Agile Software Development (ASD) has entered the field of safety-critical system development (SCSD) in the past few years. Agile has produced reliable and high-quality products by expanding its principles and adapting new measurement techniques. However, there is still a gap in improving measurement techniques and stopping failures. This paper proposed a new measurement mechanism called Package Metrics for Improving Software Development (PM-ISD). The proposed measurement enhances reliability assessment and decision-making during agile development processes. PM-ISD assists the Agile management team throughout the Medical Surgery Department (MSD) project phases to track the completion of tasks.

Agile can be compared to fitness. It means being fit enough as a team, department or organisation to be able to deal with all circumstances. Being able to react rapidly and nimbly when the situation demands it. And that is a very important skill in a time of digitalisation, disruption and rapid change. In this chapter, we explain the why, how and what of agile transformations, introduce a step-wise approach to undertake such transformations and discuss the most common pitfalls observed in practice.

Globalization and development of IT systems are conducive to changes in the entrepreneurs’ approach to the methods of carrying out tasks related to running a business. The growing competition and the need to quickly respond to the changing business environment mean that business owners are more willing to switch to agile business management methods. Cloud computing as a modern form of providing IT solutions can be successfully used in agile enterprises. The tools provided in the subscription model are increasingly being chosen by such enterprises. The aim of the article is to present the tools available in the cloud computing for managing a agile enterprise and to focus on security aspects of such solutions. The research conducted on several dozen companies using the software provided in the subscription model allowed to draw the conclusion that most enterprises are not aware of the threats on the Internet and can not protect themselves against them. In most cases, companies are not aware of the possibility of leakage of confidential data, business secrets and management models. Full confidence in cloud computing and data stored on the Internet makes small and medium enterprises an easy target for cybercriminals. As a result of the conducted research, the article presents not only the most frequently chosen software for agile enterprise management, but also selected options to increase the protection of corporate data stored in the cloud.

In this chapter we make you familiar with the relevant concepts of agile management. We start with Scrum and show you the insights of lean startup as well. After reading this chapter, you can use these tools within your organisation—making it more agile!

The growing popularity of Agile management methods has led to their application to a number of areas inside, but also outside, the software development domain. However, despite many practitioner reports, research exploring whether and how Agile practices have been applied in domains beyond software development has been rather patchy with little empirical evidence. What is there behind the hype and how can other domains learn from it? To address this gap in the research, we present the findings of our study on the application of Agile management practices in other domains, including an outlook towards a potential expansion enabling Business Agility. To practitioners, this study presents examples of Scrum applied outside the software development domain including concrete practices applied. To researchers, it presents an empirical starting point for further exploration.

The paper presents a case study which illustrates a possible application of Agile approach to crisis management. The proposal of such a merger was done in another paper, here its implementation to epidemic crisis management is described. It is shown that the nature of activities during the epidemic crisis suits the Agile philosophy fairly well and that the application of Agile frameworks to epidemic crisis management may substantially increase its efficiency, mainly due to the communication patterns which are required by the Agile approach.

The agile project management approach offers many potential benefits in terms of alignment with business needs, flexibility and adaptability as well as a strong focus on the people dimension of projects. Agile has been applied in many industrial and government organisations, but how can it be adopted by higher education institutions? This chapter provides an initial answer to this question through exploring how agile techniques can be applied to improve the performance at universities in regard to research, education and knowledge-exchange operations. This is supported by a review of agile project management, including the main features and guiding principles as well as evaluation of the scope for agile to make a positive impact on performance at universities. The chapter also includes description of three illustrative case study investigations that identify there are significant opportunities for agile management to be applied to various types of projects at higher education institutions. The cases include identification of the initial system requirements to support implementation of the relevant agile technique on appropriate infrastructure. The cases reveal that adoption of agile management would support more open forms of communication leading to improved knowledge sharing and trust-based working at universities.

This chapter discusses agility as an improvised accomplishment conducted by improvisational leaders , i.e., leaders that approach and define rules that guide behavior in normal conditions and that stimulate impromptu adaptations in unpredicted conditions, when the existing rule set failed. We do that by showing how the triad of the leadership process (leaders, followers , and context ) enacts the four principles of agile management . The contribution defends these principles are highly aligned with an improvisational understanding of leadership. The authors adopt a deliberately relational and distributed leadership perspective by exploring improvisation as a mutually constructed process of supportive leaders, compelled followers, and a conducive context. The chapter also discuss several obstacles that might limit the ability to enact agile improvisational leadership.

This study discusses the gamification in a software agile management process used by a computer laboratory. Laboratories like this have various details of organizations active in the industry. According to the events of the agile management process of the study, elements and mechanical games were used to improve the commitment and performance of collaborators and encourage follow-up of events in the process. Use of elements and mechanical gamification resulted in maintaining the commitment, increased by approximately 30% in the performance of collaborators and contributed to the improved tracking of agile management process.

The paper deals with an unpredictable appearance of a new project task in real-time designing a system with the software. Usually, this occurs at a time when the designer works in a multitasking mode and other members of the designers’ team also work with delegated tasks. For regulating such activity, the use of the Agile management is not sufficient. In described case study, Agile means are combined with means of an interruption management which is adjusted on processing the interruption reason “New task”. In the processing of the new task, the designer applies a framework “model of precedent” and its iterative filling by content with using a figuratively semantic support. Combining the indicated means is implemented in the toolkit OwnWIQA.

This chapter deals with transforming communication in agile management. Since more than a decade, agile management methods have been entering the field and are increasingly challenging more rigorous, classical project management methods. In this chapter, we investigate in how far and under what conditions agile values and principles are consistent with those of transformative communication. Subsequently, we exemplify how individual features of the people-oriented agenda can be expressed in agile projects and which consequences accrue for agile management practice and training. Moreover, the role of digital media and its dynamics in becoming more agile will be addressed and reflected in light of an organization’s success. The thoughtful inclusion of the people-oriented agenda is expected to lead to new, valuable insight regarding the integration of the task-oriented and the people-oriented agendas in agile management.

Organizational change projects are becoming frequent tasks for many organizations and require the deployment of proven management concepts to realize the planned transition. While organizational change is embedded in the fields of organizational development, change management, and project management, there are few attempts to synthesize these different disciplines into an integrated description. In addition, there is a growing demand for agility as change projects tend to become more complex and have to be performed within drifting environments. This paper discusses the relationship of organizational development, change management and project management and describes the idea of agile approaches. Coming originally from the field of software development agile methodologies are beginning to gain ground in project management, support change management, and allow for more flexibility. We suggest that agile techniques and a more integrated approach can contribute to the organization’s challenge to cope with change.

Providing an agile development team with tools to be productive goes beyond handing each one of them a laptop with compilers. Communication and collaboration tools, whether face-to-face or geographically diverse, are crucial in modern teams. Here we discuss collaboration tools and other tools that will be crucial today and in the future. We will discuss three major types of productivity tools for agile development programs/projects

One of the things that must be understood by leadership and management in the future is that just because you deliver a product on time and on budget doesn’t mean the project was an overall success. Delivering a product on budget and on schedule but decimating a development team is not, in the long run, a success for the company. Managers and Leaders must understand all aspects of development teams for long-term success. And while some managers may wonder if they have a role in the new agile development paradigm, the Agile Manager understands that their role is more important than ever to the overall success of the agile development program/project. The Agile Manager must split their time between facilitating each Sprint team to allow them to be as efficient and effective as possible, keeping track of agile productivity metrics, and keeping open and active collaboration and cooperation with the customer in terms of reviewing working software at the end of each Sprint and helping to shape the requirements, capabilities, and needs going forward. These are three paradigm domains that must be attended to by the Agile Manager in order to keep the agile development rhythms sustained throughout the agile development life cycle. A lack of commitment to any of these Agile Management domains or treating any one of them in isolation may result in ineffective Sprint development teams.

Success in the modern, agile development era required Agile Managers and Leaders who truly understand what agile development means, how to create agile teams, and how agile teams collaborate, cooperate, and function in various situations, particularly in geographically and culturally diverse environments. In addition, they must understand the agile development cycle vs. the traditional development cycle [15]. Figure 3.1 illustrates the classical program/project development cycle.

Popularity of Agile Methods is growing up and along with this popularity is also growing the interest in adopting these methods in conjunction with maturity models, like CMMI. Dozens of reports about this topic can be found with different results. Therefore, a Systematic Literature Review was conducted with the goal of identifying characteristics of agile project management in organizations using agile methods and maturity models. We accepted 34 primary studies published from 2001 to 2013. The results show that the area still lacks details on how to perform the software development activities, what techniques can be used to meet issues not directly addressed by agile methods without losing the desired agility and what tools can be used to facilitate the combination of approaches.