Agile Project Management for IT Projects in SMEs: A Framework and Success Factors

DOI

10.2991/itmr.2013.3.3.4How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Agile Method, Project Management, SMEs, IT Projects, Managing Implementation

Abstract

Project management methods have been developed from industry practices and international standards to ensure a higher rate of success for information technology projects. These have been widely used in large organisations effectively. However, when projects are implemented in a small or medium-sized enterprise environment, there is often a lack of an established method of project management or skilled project implementers who can use methods used in large organisations. As project workers find themselves pressured to become more responsive to business demands, it is becoming commonplace for smaller organisations to forgo formal project management practices. This is often due to the fact that small projects are viewed as simple to deploy, suffer from a lack of resources, or are given low prioritisation by the organisation. Additionally, the current project management standards are frequently perceived by SMEs as complicated and overly bureaucratic, something undesirable in regards to timeconstrained or low-budget projects. Agile development is one solution to the problem of overly complex methods that has recently been adopted in the field of software production, and has gained considerable popularity with smaller organisations. Through action research conducted in two closely-related SMEs in Austria, a final agile project management framework was produced in the end of the study. The developed framework consists of four phases of initiating phase (addressing objectives), planning phase (focusing on project backlog), executing and controlling phase (looking at iterative project cycles), and closing phase (working on project deliverables). Meanwhile some suggestions associated with the success of the developed agile project management framework are presented as well.

Copyright

© 2013, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - JOUR
AU  - Daniel O’Sheedy
AU  - Shankar Sankaran
PY  - 2013
DA  - 2013/09/01
TI  - Agile Project Management for IT Projects in SMEs: A Framework and Success Factors
JO  - The International Technology Management Review
SP  - 187
EP  - 195
VL  - 3
IS  - 3
SN  - 1835-5269
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/itmr.2013.3.3.4
DO  - 10.2991/itmr.2013.3.3.4
ID  - O’Sheedy2013
ER  -