Defining Scaling Strategies for the Improvement of Agility Performance in Product Development Projects

Increasingly uncertain market requirements and faster-paced innovation cycles have led to a paradigm shift towards Agile product development, which are based on the Agile Manifesto. Although initially developed for small-sized software development, recent studies focus on scaling Agile Project Management (APM) practices for larger projects and complex, physical product architectures. However, existing research lacks impact assessments of scaling decisions on the uncertainty reduction efficiency of a project, summarized as Agility Performance (AP). This paper presents a framework to strategically scale Agile practices based on targeted project outcomes. Using the product architecture and organizational structures as input parameters, the initial degree of project uncertainty is evaluated. Next, a set of scalable Agile project design parameters is derived. Individual scaling operations are then correlated with AP to assess the chosen scaling strategy’s combined effects on project cost, quality and schedule. The framework therefore equips project managers with a decision support tool for strategic project design optimization efforts.