Investigating the Scope for Agile Project Management to Be Adopted by Higher Education Institutions

The agile project management approach offers many potential benefits in terms of alignment to business needs, flexibility and adaptability as well as a strong fo-cus on the people dimension of projects. Agile has been applied in many industrial and government organisations but how can it be adopted by higher education in-stitutions? This chapter provides an initial answer to this question through explor-ing how agile techniques can be applied to improve the performance at universi-ties in regard to research, education and knowledge exchange operations. This is supported by a review of agile project management, including the main features and guiding principles as well as evaluation of the scope for agile to make a posi-tive impact on performance at universities. The chapter also includes description of three illustrative case study investigations that identify there are significant op-portunities for agile management to be applied to various types of projects at higher education institutions. The cases include identification of the initial system requirements to support implementation of the relevant agile technique on appro-priate infrastructure. The cases reveal that adoption of agile management would support more open forms of communication leading to improved knowledge sharing and trust-based working at universities