Constitution of an Agile Project Management Framework Managing Internet of Things Innovations

The fourth industrial revolution, the so-called digital transformation, shows its impact on a wide range of industries. Next to big data, the Internet of Things is one of the main drivers of digitalizing industrial processes and products as well as consumer applications. The companies, which are situated in the affected industries, therefore, have to adapt to upcoming changes due to the requirement of new competencies, internal processes and a digitalization of the product portfolio. Offering these companies a foundation for resisting the change, an agile project management framework was assumed as the right approach to cope with the digitalization impacts. Investigating into this key assumption’s value as well as building a base for a framework’s constitution, the Inter-net of Things was researched and analysed resulting in development requirements and challenges. In subsequence, the agile project management was examined based on Scrum, the Dynamic Systems Development Method and Kanban as three agile representatives. Contrasting it to traditional management to derive advantages and disadvantages of the alternative approach; agile project management was matched to the development requirements and challenges of Internet of Things. As a result of this alignment, a basic theoretical framework was constituted. Hereafter, the current circumstances by the affected, exemplary retail and shop fittings industries were approached to provide additional characteristics for the framework. For that purpose, the representative company ITAB Shop Concept Finland was examined by conducting a situation analysis. Besides process design workshops; the conduction was performed by employee interviews, a SWOT analysis as well as an internal benchmarking. Based on the completed framework’s application – consisting of chosen agile values and principles, practices and process phases – to a development project of the SMART FITTINGS™ department, a general positive impact was recognized. Next to improving the company’s and team’s communication and collaboration, the resource efficiency was increased by reviewing the project’s outcome on an iterative and regular basis leading to a faster responding to changes. Nevertheless, the implementation amount was insufficient to verify agile project management as the right approach to cope with the impact of the digital transformation and Internet of Things innovations. On that account, the framework’s implementation in further development projects as well as a consideration of further agile or non-agile project management approaches is required