Scrum4Consulting — agile project management for consulting projects

Abstract

The megatrend of digitalization is not only having an impact on IT in companies, more than ever it focuses on the development of new business models and the adaptation of business processes (Berman, 2012). In this context, client requirements for the project management approach in management consulting projects are also changing significantly (McKinsey, 2017)(Sywottek, 2018). It is no longer the autonomous development of a concept by the consulting firm, but cooperative and transparent processing, the discussion of early and tested partial results and increased short-term change requests during implementation that make it necessary to adapt the project management approach. Classic project management approaches with a waterfall like approach such as PMI (Project Management Institute, 2017) or Prince 2 (Axelos, 2017) are only suitable to a limited extent; often they are also too costly for a small project team. Management approaches such as Lean Startup (Ries, 2017) or Design Thinking (Lewrick & Link, 2018) show the current trend towards iterative and flexible methods (Denning, 2018). The goal of the research is the adaptation of Scrum (Sutherland, 2015) for management consulting projects in process, innovation or strategy consulting. In addition to the process model and the roles, the areas of requirements definition and test are primarily to be adapted. After a literature analysis and expert interviews, the procedure in industrial consulting projects was evaluated at the Munich University of Applied Sciences. With the present conception of an agile project management model for management consultancies, consulting projects outside of IT projects can be carried out agile. The cooperation between client and consultants is in the foreground, the consideration of changes is possible and positively affects the client orientation. Furthermore, projects with subsequent IT implementation are simplified. Still the requirement definition by means of user stories is unusual and the client must accept and support an increased project speed as well as the mindset of the agile proceeding.