Scaling Agile Adoption Motivators from Management Perspective: An Analytical Hierarchy Process Approach

Abstract

Agile methodology has been noted as the mostly used method for software development over the past few years. This methodology guarantees the rapid delivery of software products with lower cost and greater customer contentment. The adoption of agile methods was initially applied in the software development industry for single, small project teams following the principles of Agile Manifesto. The intense need of the time is to identify from management perspective the motivators that can be focused on to adopt agile methodologies in large-scale projects. Therefore, the main purpose of the study is to develop from management perspective a priority-based taxonomy of motivators that helps in scaling agile methodologies in large-scale projects. The taxonomy is developed in two steps. In the first step, data are collected from a survey and open literature. In the second step, the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) is implemented on the collected data that produced the proposed priority-based taxonomy of the motivators. With the help of AHP model, the 21 motivators of successful project management are categorized into four main categories, i.e., “organization management,” “team,” “customer and technology,” and “process.” Furthermore, the AHP analysis is used to rank the motivators and their respective categories in order of their importance. The findings of this study are further reviewed and validated by the agile experts in other organizations. The proposed priority-based taxonomy of motivators can be used as a handbook that gives guidelines on scalability of agile methodologies to large projects, which helps in successful management of large-scale projects.