Organizational agility: do agile project management and networking capability require market orientation?

agile information systems, flexible information systems development, distributed information systems development, global software development, software development, special issue

Rapid technological advancements and global competition have heightened the need for agility in organizations striving to meet evolving customer expectations. This study examined the experiences of software team leaders who adopted Agile methods to enhance future Agile adoption in organizations seeking to deliver timely customer value. It employed a qualitative phenomenological approach to describe the lived experiences of software team leaders throughout Agile adoption. The research question asked about the experiences of software team leaders when successfully adopting Agile methodologies for their software projects. The conceptual framework that guided this research was the Agile Software Solution Framework (ASSF). The objective of employing ASSF was to assess the level of agility demonstrated by software development teams and facilitate the identification of areas where Agile implementation could suggest organizational and procedural improvements within the development environment. Twenty-five software team leaders were interviewed who guided Agile teams through the adoption of Agile methodologies, chosen through purposeful sampling. This study used Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis to examine participant data and gain insights into how individuals make sense of a specific phenomenon in their unique context. This study documented several valuable Agile adoption techniques in its summary and recommendations section, thereby enhancing knowledge of Agile methodologies among software development team leaders. In conclusion, this study examined the successful adoption of Agile methodologies by software team leaders, providing insights into the challenges, successes, and key factors. This study benefits organizations by providing valuable insights into how software team leaders successfully adopt Agile methodologies, helping them enhance their software development practices and increase adaptability in a rapidly changing market.

Business Agility is a crucial aspect of modern organizations, reflecting their ability to adapt and thrive in a rapidly changing business landscape. At its core, Business Agility involves being responsive to change, allowing companies to swiftly adjust their strategies and operations in response to market shifts, emerging technologies, and evolving customer demands. Developer Platforms play a pivotal role in fostering Business Agility. These platforms provide a foundation for building and deploying applications, enabling developers to collaborate seamlessly and iterate rapidly. Utilizing metamodeling concepts and agile methodologies throughout the stages of creation, design, formalization, development, deployment, and validation enables the introduction of a generic metamodel for Developer Platforms. This approach enhances the adaptability to changes and technological advancements. The essential elements of this metamodel are detailed in this paper, underscoring the significance of conceptual groundwork as a mission-critical step prior to initiating the orchestration or implementation of the Developer Platform’s actual services and tools.

In a rapidly transforming business environment, agile organizations necessitate adaptive leaders who can navigate change, inspire innovation, and cultivate high-performing teams. This study examines the impact of leadership- focused training on employee morale and team cohesion, specifically within agile organizational frameworks. Adopting a mixed-methods approach, the research evaluates how tailored leadership programs reshape interpersonal dynamics, enhance employee satisfaction, and boost organizational performance. The findings underscore actionable strategies for integrating agility principles into leadership development, emphasizing their role in fostering resilience and sustainable growth. This study contributes to the evolving discourse on leadership agility by providing evidence- based insights for practitioners and policymakers. Keywords: Leadership development, agile frameworks, employee satisfaction, team collaboration, organizational performance

In business, agility is a method that places projects on a smaller scale and engages team members through constant collaboration and continuous iteration. Thus, it needs to find the factors affecting business agility. This study aims to determine the influence of networking capabilities and digital adoption on business agility with the variable business model innovation as a mediation variable using quantitative method. The results show that all variables have significant and positive effect of business agility. It is concluded that networking capabilities, digital adoption, and business model innovation can escalate business agility.

Nowadays, companies’ environment is characterized by a rapid and continuous change. This includes economic, social, political and environmental aspects. Firms should then be able to sense risks and opportunities in their environments, and to act adequately in a rapid and efficient manner. Changes become thus a main source of sustainable competitive advantage. Organizational agility is a key dynamic capability, which allows the firm to cope with new market orientations, to take advantage of risks and to seize opportunities. The agile characteristics are enabled by a set of facilitators including particularly information technology and human resources. In this work, we explore through our proposed Framework, how IT infrastructure and human resources practices can have a direct and complementary effect through IT acceptance and developed IT skills. We highlight also the role of using and mastering human resources information systems (HRIS) in enhancing organizational agility, which plays an intermediary role for firm’s sustainable performance.

Agile development processes such as Scrum have been successfully applied in the software industry for many years. Based on experience, industrial practitioners indicate three predominant benefits of agile development processes compared to traditional software development processes. First of all, development results better fit customers’ and other stakeholders’ needs. That is because they are intensively involved in the development process by receiving, applying and assessing functional software increments in a defined cadence throughout the development process. Secondly, agile development processes better cope with unexpected changes in the development process due to the built-in process flexibility. Lastly, development speed has significantly increased in most of the agile software development projects, resulting in a shorter time-to-market. Especially in the context of radical innovations for technical systems, manufacturing companies are striving for approaches to optimize their development processes in a similar direction. Traditional plan-oriented development approaches such as VDI 2221 or Cooper’s Stage-Gate Process turn out to be insufficiently customer oriented, too inflexible and project duration is usually too long to reach an adequate time-to-market. For that reason, a large community in academia and industrial practice is developing and implementing approaches to adapt agile software development practices for the development of technical systems. However, a current study in industrial practice reveals that out of 23 objectives, that are expected when introducing agile development processes to technical systems, the three objectives mentioned above, show the largest negative deviations from expected benefit to realized benefit. Therefore, the overall goal of this research is to address these gaps by developing an explicit methodological approach for an agile development of technical systems. It turns out, that mainly the role of prototyping and the way product specifications are handled during the development process change significantly in the course of introducing agility to development of technical systems. Agile practitioners strive to not necessarily define product specifications comprehensively upfront, as it is postulated in plan-oriented development processes. In contrast, product specifications, which are of major importance to the overall development project, are specified and validated with customers and other stakeholders in early prototypes. Therefore, prototypes are realized in a defined cadence throughout the development process to gradually specify and validate the product. However, the way product specifications are prioritized and selected in the development of technical systems has to differ substantially from the general way Scrum or other existing agile development processes propose. That is because technical systems are characterized by multiple technical interrelations, resulting in informational dependencies for the development process. For that reason, a prioritization along criteria such as customer value, development effort and risk seems too narrow in the context of technical systems. In fact, the prioritization of product specifications has to consider both, the value being generated by their realization as well as the informational dependencies towards other specifications. Furthermore, when designing a prototype, time constraints need to be particularly considered due to lead times in parts delivery and prototype production. Therefore, this paper introduces a methodology to prioritize and select technical design parameters in agile development processes. The methodology can be applied in the cyclical sprint planning that aims at defining the scope of the next prototype to be developed. As outlined above, the major paradigms of value generation, informational dependencies as well as lead-time and effort are crucial when adapting agile for technical systems and are consequently implemented in the methodology. These paradigms are operationalized to explicitly address the mentioned major objectives of agile development processes, which are currently showing are large gap between expected benefit and realized benefit in industrial practice. The methodology is applied to the real development process of an RGB laser light source for digital cinema projectors, which is summarized as a case study in the paper. Insights from this application are equally discussed as the resulting next steps in further developing and aligning the methodology to the needs of industrial practice.

With the continuous development and widespread adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) technology, enterprises have realized the importance of possessing artificial intelligence capabilities to enhance organizational performance. However, there is still a relative lack of empirical research on how to build AI capabilities, and how AI capabilities impact organizational innovation performance. Based on the resource-based theory, this study constructs a conceptual model of “AI Capabilities - Organizational Response (Organizational Learning and Organizational Agility) - Ambidextrous Innovation”, exploring the direct impact of AI capabilities on ambidextrous innovation, and the mediating effects of organizational learning and organizational agility, also the moderating role of digital strategy in this linkage. With data from 253 survey questionnaires of Chinese enterprises, the results indicate that: first, AI capabilities have a significantly positive impact on organizational ambidextrous innovation; second, organizations with high levels of organizational learning ability and agility can better leverage AI capabilities to promote the development of ambidextrous innovation; Thirdly, digital strategy has played an active role in regulating the influence path of two-way innovation within the organization and provided sufficient boundary conditions; fourth, The data capability, technological capability, and fundamental resource capability of AI capabilities have differentiating effects on exploratory and exploitative innovations. The findings of this research hold significant theoretical and managerial value for understanding the driving mechanisms of organizational innovation performance in the era of AI.

Innovation cannot be seen as an exclusively technical and linear process (any longer). Rather, innovation is a social process and depends on cooperation, team based work and networks. Therefore, a lean and flexible framework for innovative projects is needed. In this article, we highlight the questions if the agile framework Scrum can be seen as such a framework and how Scrum is used in organizational practice. We will show four very different ideal types of using Scrum, which reflect different ways of combining agility and innovation. The ideal types range from the attempt to establish more and better communication processes within project teams to the attempt to ensure a protective and highly self-organized space for agile teams. Keywords innovation, agile project management, agile organization, labour capacity, stress

The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of resourced based view, market orientation, implementation of information technology, effectuation and networking capability on the internationalization of Small and Medum Enterprises (SMEs) and the indirect influence between these variables with networking capability as a moderator. The research method uses a quantitative approach. The population and sample in this study are SMEs throughout East Java, Indonesia that have made efforts to internationalize, with data obtained from the Export Center Surabaya office, which is an institution formed by the East Java Provincial Trade Service and the Indonesian Chamber of Commerce. 1346 SMEs were recorded at the Export Center Surabaya office and a sample of 300 SMEs was obtained. The analysis technique used in this study is SEM PLS, which is to determine validity, reliability, and hypothesis testing. The results of the study show that resourced based view, market orientation, information technology implementation, effectuation and networking capability on SMEs internationalization have a positive and significant effect. Networking capability as a moderator can strengthen the influence of resourced based view and market orientation towards the internationalization of SMEs. Meanwhile, in the effectuation and implementation of information technology relationship with SMEs internationalization, networking capability as a moderator is in a weak position, that is it produces a negative coefficient, with a t-statistic value greater than the t-table.

This paper deliberates the influence of organisational agility (OA) on knowledge management (KM), which enables organisations to survive and achieve their competitive advantage through developing and integrating the KM strategy and sustainable knowledge transfer capability. Currently, the conception of agility has become widespread in organisational performance and in the knowledge development process. How organisations define an agile knowledge development process, how we know that an organisation’s KM strategy is agile and how we can assume that an organisation can achieve and sustain their excellence through OA and KM strategy are the questions addressed in this paper. It presents the concept of OA of KM and provides an approach for the significance of this agility, with a knowledge development approach that appraises the agility as an amalgamation function. It combines the competence of individual and organisational presentation and other complementary aspects. Keywords: Competencies, competitive advantage, efficiency, effectiveness, knowledge management, organisational agility, strategy, organisational performance.

This study uses 125 responses from companies of all sizes predominantly headquartered in Germany, Switzerland, France and UK to reveal perceptions of the drivers of organisational agility. It further investigates current understanding of managing principles of multiple organisational dimensions such as culture, values, leadership, organisational structure, processes and others to achieve greater organisational agility. The data set is disaggregated into four major profiles of agile organisations: laggards, execution specialists, experimenters, and leaders. The approach to agile transformation is analysed by each of those profiles. While the positive effect from a more holistic approach is confirmed, leaders tend to focus more on processes and products rather than project work. Respondents perceive that IT, product development and research are most agile functions within their organisations, while human resources, finance and administration are considered being not agile. Furthermore, organisations with higher levels of organisational agility tend to use more than one agile scaling framework. Implications on theories of agile transformations and organisational design are discussed.

Organizations creating new products and services are increasingly adopting agile project and portfolio management capabilities to remain innovative. However, acquiring the necessary skills and spirit is troublesome for many organizations as they rely heavily on a distinct mindset and experience that can only be acquired in the process. Literature indicates that serious games can help to bridge that gap. In this paper we take the example of agile project management methods to understand how games are applied to support the acquisition of agile and entrepreneurial capabilities. In an explorative study, we conducted qualitative interviews with game developers, business consultants, and agile coaches from nine different companies, and conducted desk research on available open source serious games. Based on 475 minutes of recorded audio, 81 pages of transcripts as well as 26 identified open source games, we discuss the purpose, characteristics, and success factors of serious games and their embedment in training. Further, we provide an analysis of available games and what capabilities they address. Based on our findings we advocate for a wider use of serious games and simulations to support the adoption of agile project and portfolio management capabilities in practice. In particular, we believe the benefits of such an approach allow participants to experience, understand, and be able to work effectively across the different interconnected components of such a capability.

This paper presents a case study using Orthogonal Defect Classification (ODC) as a diagnostic tool to understand the quality and productivity issues in a Agile enterprise web development project. The project spanned a little over two years and had an effort in the range of 100,000 hours. The use of Agile was new to this engineering team. However, the senior people in the team had several years of experience with different process models. The project used a Scrum development model and ran three week Sprints. The objective of the ODC analysis was to understand the dynamics of the development as it actually occurred - as opposed to what was on paper or believed to have been implemented. We also wanted to understand the quality of the product produced, its stability and causes of customer pain. The development process had a separate Quality Assurance (QA) function, and a development led test and inspection effort. We wanted to understand their individual effectiveness, and how the structure effected production level quality. This case study was conducted by the senior engineering team along with ODC expertise from our firm. A subset of the application (around 4 major components) were chosen for this study. This allowed for an examination of component level issues, versus systemic issues across the entire application.

Agile software development has proven to be a good fit for knowledge work in environments of high change rates, often resulting in hyper-productive teams. The bottom line seems to be that applying agile methods to software development projects reduces risk and time-to-market while high quality is achieved at the same time. We show how agility can be useful well beyond the context of individual projects, first, when managing a portfolio of projects of a company and second, when maneuvering a company in the marketplace. Companies can become more demand-driven and value-driven by embracing agility on these three levels and benefit from agility over a wider spectrum. Agile businesses react fast on changed circumstances, are flexible, bring response to the market as fast as possible, are proactive, and sense the change.