Deprojectification of agile: The new orthodoxy of long-term product teams

Abstract

Abstract Agile management thinking has influenced organisations in several ways, but the focus of this paper is on the deprojectification of agile software development. The new agile orthodoxy has been promoted by popular books, in blogs and by Spotify and other firms: agile teams should be aligned to products or domains (not projects); cover development, maintenance and operations (to reduce handover problems); and have a long-term character (to build trust, identity and domain knowledge). We first describe and contextualise the new agile orthodoxy and then, based on an empirical study of two different “agile cases,” we describe and analyse how employees and middle managers perceived the rationale behind the change to long-term teams, how they understood teams as the basic unit of the structure, their perceptions of the resource and disciplinary dimensions of the organisation and the decline of projects and project managers.