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

Abstract

The agile project managementagile project management approach offers many potential benefits in terms of alignment with business needs, flexibility and adaptability as well as a strong focus 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 institutions? This chapter provides an initial answer to this question through exploring how agile techniques can be applied to improve the performance at universities 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 positive impact on performance at universities. The chapter also includes description of three illustrative case study investigations that identify there are significant opportunities for agile management to be applied to various types of projects at higher education institutions. The cases include identification of the initial system requirementssystem requirements to support implementation of the relevant agile technique on appropriate infrastructure. The cases reveal that adoption of agile managementagile management would support more open forms of communication leading to improved knowledge sharing and trust-based working at universities.