Effect of Inadequate Self-Organized Teams in Agile Project Management: A Case Study From the Oil and Gas Industry

Introduction

Agile project management is often associated with software development projects, but the agile philosophy comes in many forms as it is more an attitude than a specific process, and more environment than methodology (Owen, Koskela, Henrich, & Codinhoto, 2006; Conboy & Morgan, 2011). Therefore, the driving factor for the agile mindset is people, and people trump processes. This is also the reason why teams, and building self-organized teams, is considered the very core of an agile project leader’s job as they are the ones who “consistently deliver on the product vision within the project constraints” (Highsmith, 2009, p. 51). Self-organizing teams promote the key business objectives for agile project management and are essential for the success of agile projects. However, despite the undisputed importance in building self-organizing teams in agile projects, it lacks focus among many projects leaders (Moe, Dingsøyr, & Dybå, 2008). Building self-organized teams can be very challenging, and different barriers for building tasks have been identified in previous research (Moe, Dingsøyr, & Dybå, 2009). Accordingly, for many project leaders, the concept of having self-organized teams seem fuzzy, messy and un-definable. This has also been followed by questions about the goodness of self-organizing teams as it has been confused with anarchy. Given the widespread problem that building self-organizing teams lack focus in many organizations (Moe, Dingsøyr, & Dybå, 2008), related literature lack the knowledge to what negative consequences this might result in. This study will, therefore, aim to explore the impact inadequate self-organizing teams have on agile projects success. It needs to be determined if self-organizing teams in agile projects are not just a contributing factor for success, but rather a necessity to avoid adverse problems. Therefore, the following question is addressed: How are inadequate self-organized teams impacting the success of agile projects? And investigate What are the failure areas for self-organizing teams that make them inadequate? And, how does the failure areas impact the critical success factors?