The international business environment is characterized by high complexity while gaining a competitive advantage and achieving long-term sustainability is a hard–gained goal. A key in reaching that goal lies on flexible methodologies that affect strategic management. The chapter's aim is to research on aspects related with Scrum's implementation and productivity/quality achieved, where a need for constant research exists. Systematic literature review was conducted in order to choose the most relevant studies and to code the key words and themes that seem most important to address this relationship, while two interviews with Scrum's experts came to provide empirical information. The most important aspects for successful agile methodologies' adoption are presented, while results indicate that “adoption” and “perception” seem to be the most critical factors for its successful implementation. Moreover, a widespread extended misconception about agile methodologies is presented leading to hybrid situations in strategic management where both agile principles and hierarchical control are used.
TopIntroduction
Over the last ten (10) years, significant changes occurred in global business environment leading to an holistic transformation of businesses’ mentality and strategies adopted. First, it was Fourth Industrial Revolution or Industry 4.0, aiming to interconnect resources – people – machines (Dwivedi et al., 2021; Hermann, Pentek, & Otto, 2016; Reinartz, Wiegand, & Imschloss, 2019) in constant data exchanging procedure (Sima, Gheorghe, Subić, & Nancu, 2020). Even though it started as a technology-oriented issue promising “fundamental improvements to the industrial process involved in manufacturing, engineering, material usage and supply chain and life cycle management” (Kagermann et al., 2013), it soon become clear that Industry’s 4.0 expansion would affect business and society (Ebert & Duarte, 2016), product / service providers and consumers as well (Kargas & Varoutas, 2020).
Industry 4.0 led business professionals to recognize the need for a holistic digital transformation (Schwab, 2017; Vaidya, Ambad, & Bhosle, 2018), as a result of the forthcoming operational decision-making process’ decentralization (Nagy, Oláh, Erdei, Máté, & Popp, 2018) and the development of a new, networked, intelligent and (most significant) agile value chain (Schumacher, Erol, & Sihn, 2016). Moreover, COVID-19 has significantly fasten digital transformation in operational and business level for industries and governments as well (Kudyba, 2020; Subramaniam et al., 2021), leading to the acceleration of the interest in specific digital sectors (e.g. big data management) as part of Industry 4.0 (Alsunaidi et al., 2021; Kostakis & Kargas, 2021; Riswantini et al., 2021). Implementing digital transformation and Industry’s 4.0 operational principles becomes critical point for gaining competitive advantage when resources are scarce (e.g., technological or financial or human resources) while competition is international (Kargas, Kiriakidis, & Zacharakis, 2020; Laitsou, Kargas, & Varoutas, 2020, 2021)
The development of a dynamic, competitive, globalized and digitally connected business environment (Ejsmont et al., 2020) has directly or indirectly influenced the complexity of the economic system (E. Westkämper, Constantinescu, & Hummel, 2006; E. Westkämper, Spath, Constantinescu, & Lentes, 2013). Under these circumstances companies and professionals even before millennium recognized the need for complexity reducing, not only in industrial production but moreover to very aspect of the value chain (Ejsmont et al., 2020). In 2001, a team of software developers across U.S.A. gathered together to share their ideas for complexity reducing. The team’s members were following a variety of competitive frameworks, such as eXtreme Programing (XP), Crystal Methodologies, Scrum, Adaptive Software Development (ASD), Feature-Driven Development (FDD), Dynamic-Systems-Development Method (DSDM) and others.
The result of the team’s brainstorming was a document known as the “Manifesto for Agile Software Development” (Fowler & Highsmith, 2001) that entered the core values for a “lighter” approach to building software, but moreover it introduced a new mentality on software’s development project management. Agile methodology’s core values are based on (what is valued more is agile methodology):
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Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.
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Working software over comprehensive documentation.
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Customer collaboration over contract negotiation.
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Responding to change over following a plan.