Understanding the Agile Approach: A Grounded Theory of How Empower Team Members and Stakeholders Case Study: Petroleum Corporate in Tunisia ()
1. Introduction
The term “Agile” is used for the first time in “the 21st Century” Manufacturing Enterprise Strategy Report” by Nagel (1992): “The existing industrial era dominated by mass production manufacturing is drawing to a close. It is giving way to a new era, to be dominated by Agile manufacturing enterprises. The Agile Manufacturing Enterprise Forum seeks nothing less than the revival of American competitiveness through the adoption of Agile manufacturing strategies”.
This article shows us the Agile methods at Work series. Whether for a project manager, a software developer, or a senior manager, this series is designed to help them to get greater agility from their team members (Glaser & Strauss, 2006).
Quite logically, the requirements that push an increasing number of companies to move into Agile become the driving axes of the transformation they undertake. Because if it is important to know why you are engaging in transformation, it is absolutely essential to determine the target to be achieved and describe the expected benefits.
The Grounded theory is a qualitative research method wherein researchers construct theory from data. It is helpful for clarifying the behavioral paradigm that shapes social processes as people cooperate (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). The aim of grounded theory research is to know the action in a fundamental area from the position of the actors implicated (Glaser, 1998).
For that, the grounded theory is best for answering questions of the form: “What is going on here?” Rennie (1998) declares that “grounded theory is valuable especially when we want to understand how people manage their lives in each situation and about the process of how people deal with what is happening to them”. A description of a situation is developed that identifies the main classifications, their relationships, background, and method; a grounded theory of a phenomenon is much more than a descriptive account (Becker, 1994).
Hoda et al. (2010) argue that “The self-organizing teams recognized six roles that team members perform to enable the establishment of self-organizing teams”: Mentor Guides assists them to become confident in their use of Agile methods.
Coordinator Acts as a representative of the self-organizing Agile team to coordinate communication from customers. A translator is enabled to translate between business language and technical terminology used by the team. A promoter promotes Agile with customers and attempts to secure their involvement to be a self-organizing Agile team.
In the 1980s, several methodologies such as Rapid Application Development, IID (Iterative and Incremental Development) which will be gradually integrated, in the 1990s, into frameworks development such as XP (extreme Programming), Kanban or Scrum to name but a few (Hoda & Murugesan, 2016).
A large number of the most innovative corporates depend on Agile when it comes to fostering innovation, such as Amazon, Netflix, and Tesla (Ferreira et al., 2011).
Wellins et al. (1991) determined that a corporation which delivers greater empowerment to its employees would be characterized by its strengths to guarantee their durability and existence.
Similarly, Rochon (2014) discerned teamwork as a key success factor for employee performance and explained it as a group of employees who work together in order to achieve a certain goal. Especially, teamwork is a collaborative and shared activity that is directed towards accomplishing desired objectives. Teamwork is an effective means to democratize organizations and increase employee involvement. In fact, they introduce a collaborative mindset and good training.
Corresponding to Jun et al. (2006), training requires various advantages for employees to enlarge their knowledge, skills, and abilities develop more efficient team members, and enhance career development.
Beginning with its creation in the pretended Agile Manifesto in 2001, it has expanded far beyond its original context of software development as executives from a variety of corporate backgrounds introduce Agile methods in their respective corporations (Tessem, 2014).
The Important principles of the Agile Manifesto can be identified directly or indirectly from the characteristics of a team Agile development. It works by iterative and incremental cycles of creating value for the user, it is self-organized, in constant collaboration with his client, and tries to continuously improve by wearing a critical look at his activity and his way of function. Faced with this wide variety of choices, an inevitable question arises for companies wishing to deploy Agile: How does empowerment occur through an interactional change in Agile team developments? To address this research question, this article follows a grounded theory approach (Strauss & Corbin, 1990) and draws on 20 semi-structured in-depth interviews with team members and project managers working with the Agile approach. From analyzing the teams and their interactions, the creation of empowerment through continuous interactions with their stakeholders in the organizational context of petroleum industries.
This study constructs qualitative studies about the empowerment of the Agile team member; the article will be composed of four parts: the literature review, the methodology, the sample, and the interviews at the end.
From this perspective, this study may help drive the research to the next stage of city brand perception research.
2. Literature Review
The Scrum method analyzed by (Hoda et al. 2011; Hoda & Murugesan, 2016) constitutes a pure version or is associated with another framework, and is the most widely used. The statistics are clear, in the annual report on the State of Agile 2020, it is indicated that 58% of Agile teams practice Scrum, 8% a hybrid form of Scrum and Extreme Programming, and 10% a hybrid form of Scrum and Kanban, the Scrum ban. However, Scrum is today the most widespread framework because it translates concretely and simply most of them the principles of the Agile Manifesto. Iterative and incremental logic is embodied in sprints of a duration that does not exceed one month.
· Collaboration between stakeholders is embodied in a role system (Product Owner, Scrum Master, etc.) that takes well care to define the responsibilities, rights, and everyone’s duties.
· The self-organization of the team (Vidgen & Wang, 2009; Hoda & Murugesan, 2016) is embodied in rituals at the beginning, in progress, and at the end of the sprint as well as in artifacts that are not anything more and nothing less than tools at the disposal of the team to effectively prioritize and monitor the progress of work in progress.
The Success of an Agile team today depends primarily on fast-moving, complex business projects, everyone should learn how to become more Agile, but being Agile isn’t just finding another way to deliver products. We’ll go through all the roles, then it will be easy to learn the responsibilities for each of these roles.
Team attitude and technical competence, championing, and Top Management Support (TMS) are the key factors determining the extent to which Agile practices can be assimilated into an organization.
The project manager in the team spent a great deal of time planning, designing, and estimating. And only then could they start building. Once they started, it became extremely difficult to change direction. With this way, the project manager would have to bend steel and break concrete. This inflexible approach led to many failed software projects and unhappy project managers.
All teams require certain skills and competences in order to carry out their work and produce their deliverables (Adolph et al., 2012). When forming teams, it is critical to understand the needed competencies and to ensure the team members have those. As team progress, they develop key strengths that the project manager can leverage to improve overall team performance, as well as challenges that the team will need to identify and overcome for better performance.
As part of developing an overall team performance, a technique like SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis Humphrey (2005), might be used to identify team strengths that may be addressed during the project.
All project teams are tasked with making decisions about activities, risks, estimates, and many other challenges. Part of forming a team is identifying how the team will make decisions together, and how they will handle conflict resolution when disagreements arise. In addition, the team needs to address decision making and conflict resolution.
A lot of project managers get particularly hung up on not following a plan. They assume that Agile means no planning. The list of values is not saying that, it’s saying that responding to change is more important than following a plan. The Agile Alliance thought project managers were spending too much time planning and not enough time responding to change.
It exists five core values at the Agile process: Communication, simplicity, feedback, courage, and respect.
The first value is communication. Agile puts a high premium on communication. We see this emphasis on communication with the shared workspace, user stories, pair programming, collective code ownership, and daily stand-ups. The team has a dedicated scrum master whose job it is to notice when people aren’t communicating.
The second value is simplicity. The output should be the simplest solution for the job. Over-engineering can be a big problem in software development. The team should do the simplest thing that could possibly work.
The third value is feedback. This core value is really a subset of communication. The team needs to give feedback to each other. The product owner should give feedback to the team. The team should collaborate with the product owner and make changes. There should always be someone giving his feedback or getting feedback from others.
The fourth value is courage. In a way this value gives insight into how an Agile team interacts. It takes courage to communicate and accept feedback. They also need the courage to improve work in code. Agile teams build and improve products a little at a time. That means that the small solution created earlier might have to be thrown away and improved. This is called software refactoring, and it is a continuous effort by the team. Even if the software work, the team will continue to improve it.
The final value is respect. This value was added a few years after the first four. It’s respect for each other. This is the anti-superhero value. Every team will have varying degrees of experience and expertise. The developers will know more than the customer, some of the developers will be more experienced than others. For the team to work well, the team needs to share their knowledge and respect their coworkers. They need to accept that there’s no one superhero, and the entire team deserves respect. It means that there’s a superhero in everyone one on the team. That means everyone’s knowledge should be respected. If someone feels like they’re not taken seriously, then it’s kryptonite for the rest of the team.
Delivering like an Agile team. Many projects create very detailed specifications. The problem with this approach is not every customer knows everything they want before the project begins. This is especially true with software projects. Agile addresses this challenge by changing the way the customer views the deliverable. The product owner doesn’t try to know everything about the project.
3. Methodology
The classic method requires increased documentation in the follow-up of the project and accepts hardly change. In the dynamic environment in which the petroleum companies, practitioners and researchers highlight the value of an integrated organization and the Agile method.
In order to understand the relationship between the empowerment and the Agile method in the context of Agile, we conducted an exploratory and qualitative research study in a petroleum corporate industry. Before presenting the Results of our research, we will first explain our methodological approach.
We chose an exploratory qualitative case study to observe the dynamics of the dimensions studied and to analyze them in depth (Yin, 1994). The study of case involves an analysis of different aspects of a situation to reveal the significant elements and the links between them.
In order to understand the principles of the Agile method, the empowerment of the team at the context of Agile, we conducted an exploratory case study in a petroleum company at Shell upstream LTD because the purpose of Shell’s Upstream is to optimise the value of existing assets and to grow and reshape the portfolio to add more value same purpose as Agile. It’s a dynamic and rewarding environment where you can develop the skills you need to succeed in a global company. This study is based on twenty semi-structured interviews with fifteen project managers and team members using the Agile method. Each interview took approximately 45 - 120 min. These face-to-face interviews aided to record the verbal information and capture the interviewee’s expressions and tone (Hoda et al., 2011). All these interviews were transcribed for analysis.
The NVivo software analysis used to gather the data of the research. This data helped in developing more knowledge about task allocated to Agile teams. We applied open coding, the Strauss and Corbin GT’s procedure of data analysis (Strauss & Corbin, 1990) on participants’ transcribed interview responses.
In addition to Interviews, we accompanied the teams of developers for seven months. This engagement allowed us to write observation notes, to have discussions informal with developers and project manager at the corporate.
When a site agreed to participate in the study, we scheduled a kick-off meeting with the participant groups to explain the study and, specifically, the ethics of informed consent.
Most subjects were directly involved with the creation and delivery of software, and had job titles such as project manager, software development manager, business analyst, engineer, and developer.
4. Sampling
The advancing theory leads the sampling process but, without any data to examine, where do we start? We “booted up” the process using “judgmental” (Marshall, 1996) sampling to hire our first interview candidates. Our goal was to begin with a kind of views and frame the topic by asking both line developers and project managers from the corporate to tell us their stories about how they managed and empower the team members and the stakeholders. This first phase generated many open codes capturing how people empower team member and stakeholders. Clustering the codes quickly saturated the categories directly related to how empower team members.
The Agile team may engage in accepting empowerment or refusal empowerment interactions. Agile teams signaled a readiness to be empowered while stakeholders engaged in empowering behaviors. In fact, accepting empowerment as empowerment improves team action is concerned, and the teams got the responsibility for the product and the outcomes, as stated by the Agile Principles. Related behaviors determining the decision that should be done during a Sprint and deciding how to achieve all tasks. This appears reasonable, given their proximity to the product and their understanding of the tasks that required completion to further develop the product.
Throughout the interviews we will be able to find two questions per person; that’s why we can find more than 15 interviews. Not all answers will be appeared at the transcription.
Interviewee no. 1. Project Manager: What does a project manager do in Agile?
“The role of the project manager isn’t clearly defined in Agile framework. Understandably this causes some friction with many project managers. It’s hard to motivate managers to embrace Agile if they feel their role is less than essential. Also, project management has several structural challenges that will make it difficult for many project managers to see their path to Agile. One challenge is many organizations see project managers as talent feeders into positions with greater responsibility. So many project managers are already ambitious and well connected. There are also many directors or senior managers who started as project managers. They will tend to see the organization from that perspective. This will make changes even more difficult and uncertain. It takes a very open-minded project manager to accept some of the key tenants of Agile.”
Another interviewee no 2. How the team self-organized their daily stand-up meetings?
“Begin with a small core team and make sure they correctly follow the Agile framework. If we work at a mid-size organization, then the team could have as little as four people. Then, we can expand Agile in our organization through conversion by contagion.
So, we convert one team to Agile and then share their contagious excitement with the rest of the organization. Try to keep this core team happy.”
Terminator who Identifies team members threatening the proper functioning and productivity of the self-organizing Agile team and Champion the Agile with the senior management within their organization in order to gain support for the self-organizing Agile team.
The foundations of Agility are found in the 1970s with the Toyota Production System (TPS) in the field of industry, deployed on the entire Toyota production line.
Instead, they focus on the highest-value items first. This is ranked in the product backlog that they were always updating. The hunt for Agile value was part of a story that started a century ago. An Italian economist named Vilfredo Pareto was getting peas from his garden.
Pareto noticed that roughly 20% of his pea plants produced about 80% of his peas. That meant that 20% of his pea plants were producing 80% of his overall pea harvest. This 80/20 rule stuck with him. Pareto may have never guessed that years later his rule was also true for software.
Another interviewee no 3. Project Manager: What does a project manager do in Agile?
“When I used to work as a project manager, I would first set up a meeting with the team to see how long it would take to complete the project. The team would say there’s not enough information for an estimate. I would say of course there’s not enough information that’s why it’s an estimate. They would insist on more information but begrudgingly give me a date.”
Another interviewee no 9. Project Manager: What does a project manager do in Agile?
“For many project managers, that’s a long journey. There are a few things to keep in mind to help with this transition. The first and foremost is to remember that Agile is a significant departure from traditional project management.
It’s all too easy to see new things as more of the same with a new name. I once worked with a project manager who described himself as too agnostic. He said he didn’t care whether we used Agile, Waterfall, or whatever. He said he was just interested in getting the job done. He would say, ‘As long I can get everybody on the same page, doing the right thing, I don’t care how we get there’. It was very difficult to get him working with the Agile team, because getting everybody doing the right work was inconsistent with self-organization. It certainly wasn’t his intention to stifle the team, but his expectations were not in line with the Agile framework. He didn’t realize that his perceived too agnostic approach was actually a careers worth of expectations and norms. If we’re a project manager and we’re working with an Agile team, I should feel much different. It’s like starting out with weightlifting; if it doesn’t feel heavy, than we’re not lifting enough weight. Try to accept that Agile is a significant change. Then you can decide to work for or against Agile in our organization. Train a core team to evangelize others, the best way to start Agile in our organization is to think small.”
Interviewee no 6. How the PM and the team colleagues worked on a former project?
“The team usually has a lot more knowledge than their managers. Because of this reality an Agile team is best qualified to make many of the decisions for the project, that’s why an Agile team is self-organized. Self-organized is a loaded term for project managers who spent their careers managing teams. They’ll often see self-organizing as an unfulfilled promise, like a self-cleaning oven or self-watering plants.
They’ll see self-organizing as all happy talk, at some point you’re going to have to clean your kitchen or get a cat eat new foods. But self-organizing is not about taking the manager out of the team, and it’s instead about making the people who are doing the work responsible for scheduling the work. The self-organized team takes on a lot of that responsibility that was previously left to the project managers. In an Agile project the team does the estimating, the team breaks the work into smaller tasks, and the team improves their performance. Agile recognizes that the estimation dance puts the project manager in an unfair position.”
Another interviewee no 8. How the PM and the team colleagues worked on a former project?
“The Agile team is responsible for the outcome even though they have little knowledge of what goes into the estimate. Self-organizing isn’t about taking authority from the project manager instead it’s about breaking down the inefficiency of being responsible for the team’s work. This problem is only increasing as the team gets more skilled and the work becomes more complex.”
Accepting empowerment by the team was also expressed by self organized for daily Agile work, as partly reflected by the quotes mentioned above and the following quote by interviewee no. 20 who talks about how the team self-organized their daily stand-up meetings:
“Letting the team self-organize and empower. The teams did their daily meeting every day. Each team did this on themselves and organizing it this way has really worked.
This empowerment-increasing behavior by the team can be reflected by the corresponding stakeholders, who support the empowerment. The promise of satisfied team members who behave responsibly regarding the product is the main motivation to engage in empowering behavior. Several of the interviewed leaders indicated that team members should be empowered to also improve their involvement with the product.”
Interviewee no. 5. What frameworks do you use at your corporate?
“The framework proceeded the Agile manifesto, so it started out with its own list of values. These values are designed to help an Agile teamwork in harmony.”
Interviewee no 17. Team members with higher levels of experience had more say in the decision-making process and were assigned leadership tasks more often (Anastasia et al., 2020).
“Team members will have spent years developing their skills. The designers will have attended design school and have sophisticated software. The developers usually have an engineering degree and have mastered several programming languages. The database engineers will have certifications from Oracle or Microsoft. A manager can not be expected to have this level of expertise. This makes it difficult to manage these employees in the same way managers did a few hundred years ago. If we’re the scrum master for the team try to defend the team from being managed. If there’s a project manager on this team make sure that they understand that this is not a traditional team, it’s not the project manager’s role to create estimates and drive the work. The self-organized team, the product backlog, and the role of the scrum master are all significant departures from traditional project management. Despite these challenges, it’s still very possible for project managers to add significant value to Agile. They’re usually two routes that a project manager can take. First, the team level keeps the project manager in the team. The second option would be to work at the portfolio level. The portfolio level is where your groups of projects have called portfolios. So the project manager would not work with this team, but coordinate all of the projects in the Agile portfolio.”
The team members may reject to be empowered and choose to be trained with less responsibilities and decision-making power, while managers may deny empowerment of Agile teams (Diab &Ajlouni, 2015).
Interviewee no 18. Why team member refusing to be empowered?
“It’s far more common for project managers to continue to work with the team. This requires a lot more effort to change. Project managers need to rethink the way they approach their projects. At the team level, a project manager can translate Agile work into something that’s digestible to a traditional enterprise. In this new role the project manager will be protecting the team from sliding back into traditional project management. It will take a high degree of professionalism to work against what many project managers have done their entire career. It’s almost like when they hire computer hackers to be security experts. To be effective, the project manager will have to see a lot of value in the Agile framework.”
“If the team members like Agile, then they’ll be your strongest advocates for change. Give them time to be successful. They should see the benefits of the change. Instead, I put all of my energy into making Agile work well. Because this core team will be our ambassadors in Agile, we need to make sure that they are correctly, following the framework. If the first team doesn’t understand Agile, then they will likely spread a lot of misinformation. I once worked for an organization where the developers wrote most of the user stories. In Agile, the product owner writes the user stories.”
Another interviewee no 19. Why team member refusing to be empowered?
“I asked how this problem started and then traced it back to a misunderstood exercise in the Agile training. Once the practice was solidified, it was almost impossible to restart correctly. The retraining took longer than it would’ve taken to carefully explain the first exercise. Ideally, the training should happen before the work begins.”
The core group should have two goals. The first goal is gotten everybody understanding the rules of Agile. The second goal is trying to give the team a forum for discussing their doubts and concerns. If the organization isn’t ready, it should certainly be discussed in the training.
Interviewee no 16. Can training help team members to empower their autonomy and responsibility?
“One way to keep this from happening is to make sure your trainer is not the same person who is selling other Agile products. A good salesperson will never want an open forum to discuss whether or not the product was a good idea. Instead, try to find Agile trainers from a local university. You can also find certified Agile trainers on certification websites, like the Scrum Alliance. A good trainer shouldn’t be afraid of challenging questions. If possible, we should try to have everyone on the team attend training at the same time.”
Interviewee no 14. Can training help team members to empower their autonomy and responsibility (Elnaga & Imran, 2013)?
“A well-trained team is a good investment. The team will start with good habits before bad habits have a chance to settle in. It also creates some of our most enthusiastic Agile champions. A team that is excited and doing Agile well will have a significant impact on the rest of the organization.”
Interviewee no 12. As a team member, you have a positive experience with the Agile method?
“As a team member mindset will be the key to whether or not our organization succeeds with Agile.”
Interviewee no 10. Collaboration and communication between team members?
“In some organizations, this might not be an easy fix. This is a battle that the scrum master should fight to win. In our organization, it just won’t happen. I should seriously consider if Agile is a good fit. I decide to press on with Agile, then try to ensure that at least two things happen. First, try to make sure at least the product owner sits next to some of the members of the team. The team will want to know what makes the project successful. That’s the information we’ll get from a product owner. The product owner will have certain expectations, whether they tell us or not. They will be our best insight we have into our customers’ expectations. Second, the scrum master should at least try to have some dedicated space for the team to meet. This can be a scrum room or in an open space next to the cubicles. The hope is that after the daily standup meetings, many team members will stay in that space to collaborate. It’s a good way to get some shared work time.”
5. The Relationship between the Agile Team Member and Stakeholders
Interviewee no 13.
“That will help us to build a foundation that will sustain our organization for the long haul. Don’t start by promising immediate results. That type of expectation is almost sure to fizzle.
Instead, start by listing the challenges we have with our current projects then see if we can get everyone to agree that there’s a need for change. It’ll be much easier to start Agile if everyone first agrees that there’s a problem that needs to be solved. A lot of organizations get stuck because they have too much invested in the status quo and yet realize they need to change. we’ll want to start by listing what’s wrong with the status quo as a way to motivate our organization to move forward.
Not enough work was done at the beginning of the project to make sure that all the unknowns had been accounted for. After the project starts, the manager fills in the missing pieces to make sure the project works.”
The stakeholder or other sales team did not create a realistic timeline. The projects have changing priorities. After the beginning of each project, it starts to transform into something unrecognizable from the plan.
6. Result and Conclusion
We categorized the data with short phrases that summarize the most important points during a codification. These were condensed into two to three words, captured in the NVivo. As a result, different concepts from similar codes appeared, one the most prominent of which was task allocation through self-assignment. Others included manager-driven, manager-assisted, team-driven, and team-assisted task allocation.
This article shows us the Agile methods at Work series. Whether for a project manager, a software developer, or a senior manager, this series is designed to help them to get greater agility from their team members.
Our research was carried out within a petroleum corporate industry Shell Upstream LTD in Tunisia. The company specializes in Oil and Gas Extraction, Mining, Quarrying, Crude petroleum, and natural gas. The company, therefore, offers its customers advice, expertise, monitoring, and support.
This research has contributed to Agile practitioners. Our explanations of the positive consequence of self-assignment should promote novice Agile teams and their managers to attempt self-assignment as a key practice (Bramble, 1992). Also, Agile teams trying to be self-organized to get solutions to their challenges in this study. Our results can be applied as a guide for the project managers to facilitate self-organization by empowering team members. The grounded theory is presented in a form that can be understood through well-defined: context, causal conditions, and a strategy applied by Agile teams to practise self-organization work.
The current studies literature acknowledges empowerment as an important element in taking new outcomes (Dayan & Elbanna, 2011) but takes a rather one-sided perception.
The literature review shows that an important number of researchers analysed organizational commitment and found that it can be affected by different factors such as employee empowerment and teamwork. Employee empowerment is generally recognized by communicating knowledge, and developing intellectual capability (Karim & Rehman, 2012).
The present study’s new conceptualization of empowerment as an interaction between the team and the stakeholders: Empowerment tends to be analysed either from the view of the team participating in empowering manager behaviors to foster, among other aspects, the project manager of teams (e.g. Pearce, 2006) or from the perspective of the team’s collective sense of being empowered (e.g. Kirkman et al., 2004).
Research considering both perspectives tends to view empowering managers’ behaviors as ancestors of team empowerment (e.g. Lorinkova et al., 2013).
From the managerial perspective, some managerial perspectives for the corporate are provided in this research (Fox et al., 2008). Based on the underlying results, there are three main processes that managers and organizations can address to realize the most practical benefits.
First, empowerment plays an important role in Agile, adaptability, and innovation, it can be recommended to organizations, and strategic and human relations departments to center work design and human development methods through empowerment. For teams, they want to establish work practices that map to the four dimensions of team psychological empowerment (Kirkman & Rosen, 1999): Experiencing self-organizing could mean moving to monitor the technical development of structures in the team and training them to learn how to achieve feats an individual could never accomplish.
Second, as the results and the model expose, empowerment as a prototype to adaptability is not a pure empowerment state but instead a temporary empowerment equilibrium that results from empowerment enhancing and empowerment-reducing interactions. This nature of empowerment is embedded in its theoretical foundations with empowerment being considered as relationally dynamic between managers and subordinates sharing power (Conger & Kanungo, 1988). In addition, team empowerment is viewed as an emergent state (Marks et al., 2001), and thus, demonstrates a dynamic nature by definition (Maynard et al., 2013).
Third, as balancing empowerment interests and dealing with customers and the organization.
Actors rise in iterative aspect adaptations; it is crucial to deliver an environment where team adaptation can arise.
The present research results indicate that empowerment-oriented top management structures turned out to be helpful for empowerment-enhancing temporary states and consequently adaptability and adaptation. It may not be feasible to have a fully Agile organization, but managers should be informed that other organizational units interact and empower the Agile team, which might negatively impact the Agile way of working.
The responsibility of Agile teams and the project manager should be clearly stated and the required interaction with other organizational units potentially needs to be supported by the leader so that hierarchical structures in the immediate context of the Agile teams do not interfere with their work (Sy, 2007).
The literature review highlighted the superiority of the Agile method over the classic method arguing that it creates more value for the customer (quality, productivity, time-to-market). However, it can be incompatible with certain organizational cultures (Iivari & Huisman, 2007). According to Boehm and Turner (2003), the classical method allows the stability and discipline that are the Achilles heels of the Agile method. Thus, for these authors, the company should adopt a balanced method integrating both discipline and Agility. In future research, it would be relevant to study and compare the two methods, classical and Agile, in projects with different characteristics in relation to the success criteria.
From a theoretical perspective, empowerment is perceived as giving team members the allowing competence to change (Burke et al., 2006), but unexpectedly, research has not yet linked team empowerment to team adaptation (Maynard et al., 2013).
No research comes without limitations; however, some of these limitations can provide opportunities for further research. While it has been emphasized that the corporate context might partly justify these variations, future research should investigate why some teams apply Agile methods at full force while other teams in the same corporate use a hybrid structure of traditional and Agile methods. Agile teams are a special type of innovation.
An interesting direction for future research includes studying the emergence of empowerment over time. The underlying interviews have been conducted at one point in time and captured a temporal component essential to the interviewees throughout the interviews. An interesting extension to this approach can be a dynamic perspective with interviews over several points in time.