Abstract
Advancements in technology, especially ICTs, has caused a revolutionary change in every aspect of life. The reflection of these advancements on manufacturing industry is named “The Industrial Internet,” or “Industry 4.0.” New generation factories are to be equipped with cyber-physical systems. Teams integrating physical industrial components, and advanced modern sensing and networking technologies to form new smart systems. These systems will have more capabilities than the systems which are already in use. These winds of change will also affect projects and project management. Clearly, success in agile project management will become more crucial. At this point, technologies enabling Industry 4.0 will help project managers. Project organizations have the flexibility to get adapted to new situations fast. In this chapter, benefits of the technologies enabling Industry 4.0 in project management are introduced.
TopAgility
Before deepening the discussion on advanced technologies and their potential for improving agility in project management, the concept of “Agility” is revisited. Agile is defined as “ability to move quickly and easily” in dictionaries (agile definition Oxford Dictionaries, n.d.), it is “a time-boxed, iterative approach to software delivery that builds software incrementally from the start of the project, instead of trying to deliver it all at once near the end” in software industry (Rasmusson, 2018). The “Agile” adventure of the business world started with Agile Manifesto in 2001(Larson & Chang, 2016). Thus, it is better to keep in mind what Agile Manifesto tells us. If you visit the website http://agilemanifesto.org/, the message will see is given in Figure 1.
Authors of Agile Manifesto target software industry, yet their manifesto and the twelve principles behind it are very valuable for all other project-oriented industries. The importance of success in project management has already absorbed by the business environment. Yet failure rates are at still significant levels (Serrador & Pinto, 2015). When complexity, uncertainty, and time constraints are tight in projects, classical approaches fail, and projects end up with overruns. Projects need flexibility to be adapted to their ever-changing ecosystem and to cope with trouble (Alami, 2016). Inflexible project environment creates a chain of failure causes. Hence, identifying one simple specific cause of failure for any failed project is nothing more than looking for a scapegoat (Lehtinen, Mäntylä, Vanhanen, Itkonen, & Lassenius, 2014).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Computational Intelligence: A branch of AI that covers the subjects Artificial Neural Networks, Evolutionary Computation, and Fuzzy Logic.
Internet of Things: Internet connected objects.
3D Printing: Transformation of digital designs into objects by adding successive layers on each other of a specific material.
Artificial Intelligence: AI is a term, which consists of not only algorithms but also expert systems and formal logic.
Big Data: Big and complex data sets that necessitates advanced processing software and hardware.
Smart Analytics: Systematic quantitative analysis of data or statistics to obtain meaningful information for better decision-making.
Cloud Computing: a large-scale distributed computing paradigm driven by economies of scale, in which a pool of abstracted, virtualized, dynamically-scalable, highly available, and configurable and reconfigurable computing resources can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort in the data centers.
Digital Twin: Virtual representation of a real-world object
Industry 4.0: Deployment of advanced automation and data processing technologies in manufacturing systems.
Sensor: An electrical circuit that converts one type of energy to electrical signals.