Abstract
Agile project management (APM) does away with the role and the job title of the manager and instead places emphasis on self-organizing teams. However, recent surveys show that the job title of managers, particularly the project manager, is in existence on a significant number of agile projects. At the same time there is very little empirical evidence on the manager’s role in an APM framework. To address this issue, a Grounded Theory study involving 20 software professionals from 18 different organizations which employed Agile Software Development (ASD) was carried out. The key finding of this preliminary study is the identification of the four roles played by managers on agile teams: mentor, coordinator, negotiator, and process adapter. As a mentor, the manager guides and supports the team in agile practice; the coordinator facilitates and coordinates the teams functioning; the negotiator takes care of the budget and customer requirements; and as a process adapter, the manager customizes agile and also implements agile-waterfall hybrids. The results of this study highlight the need for in-depth research into the different management roles and functioning of the agile team and manager. Additionally, this study will help guide new and existing managers to better understand the various aspects and boundaries of their new roles on agile projects and enable them to better facilitate self-organizing teams.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Proceedings of the 10th Innovations in Software Engineering Conference (Formerly known as India Software Engineering Conference) |
Editors | Santonu Sarkar, Nenad Medvidovic, Vinay Kulkarni, Atul Kumar, Padmaja Joshi, Paola Inverardi |
Place of Publication | New York NY USA |
Publisher | Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) |
Pages | 45-55 |
Number of pages | 11 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9781450348560 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2017 |
Externally published | Yes |
Event | Innovations in Software Engineering Conference 2017 - Jaipur, India Duration: 5 Feb 2017 → 7 Feb 2017 Conference number: 10th https://web.archive.org/web/20170204112318/http://isec2017.in/ |
Conference
Conference | Innovations in Software Engineering Conference 2017 |
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Abbreviated title | ISEC 2017 |
Country/Territory | India |
City | Jaipur |
Period | 5/02/17 → 7/02/17 |
Internet address |
Keywords
- Agile project management
- Agile software development
- Grounded theory
- Manager
- Project management
- Self-organizing team