Examining the Agile Project Management Practices in the Malaysian Construction Industry

Abstract

Agile Project Management (APM) is traceable as a concept for software development and IT projects. It represents one of the basic competitive advantages of contemporary organizations that can be applied to almost any large-scale project in any industry. Construction projects being a high uncertainties, high changes, high complexity, and high risk industry is yet to be seen if the adaptive approach of APM is applicable. A questionnaire consisting of four core agile values and 70 agile practices was used to study the inclination of project management practices in the Malaysian construction industry. The survey, which garnered 210 responses from construction personnel, revealed the inclination of four core agile values between 6.38 and 7.34 on the scale of 0-10, while agile practices scored between 3.4 to 4.0 on 0-5. The agile oriented group is found had applied 25 out of the 70 project agile practices more frequent than the non-agile oriented group. Smaller organizations have adopted more agile project practices, especially those related to the continuous improvement domain. The study concluded that the Malaysian construction participants are leaning towards the core value of project management, and indeed practiced agility in most of the project management tasks currently.