Building agile teams

Abstract

“Successful project teams lead to more successful projects” (B. N. Baker, Murphy, & Fisher, 2008) and better collaboration within project teams lead to more successful projects (Hoegl & Gemuenden, 2001). Hence, proper collaboration within project teams is of high importance to the successful outcome of a project. However, in a considerable number of projects in the engineering industry, collaboration is not optimal. Communication and knowledge sharing are both aspects of collaboration that often lack in teams in the engineering industry (Humpfrey, Ma, Qi, & Wang, 2008). This leads to unbalanced team dynamics and demotivated project team members.
Moreover, in complicated and innovative projects, project complexity often makes it challenging to precisely determine the outcome of a project. Clients assume to know upfront what they require, however, along with growth and innovation within the design, the clients often adapt their expectations and thereby requirements with it. Adapting these requirements during later stages of traditionally managed projects often leads to budget overruns, time delays and reduced productivity of the employees (Ibbs, 2012). These problems can be partially attributed to the characteristic of traditional project management of freezing the requirements at the start of the project. This management methodology is not designed to unfreeze and adapt the requirements at later stages.
Abovementioned problems of collaboration and requirements management have led to the introduction of agile project management (APM) in the software development industry (AgileAlliance, 2001). APM aims at value creation rather than freezing project design at early stages and by means of better communication, collaboration is improved as well.