Organization agility in Sri Lankan software industry

Abstract

Agile Project management (APM) and Agile Software Development (ASD) are two widely discussed topics in the software industry. Since the inception of Agile Manifesto in 2001, many organizations have implemented agile methods with many more planning agile transitions. One of the core aspects of APM is adding value to the customer, which in turn provides high percentage of Return on Investment (ROI) to the organization. Consequently, Sri Lankan software industry needs to be much more agile with comparison to other countries to compete in the ever so challenging global software industry. The first objective of this research was to identify the agile implementation success factors in which influence the organizations to be agile. Second objective was to determine the level of implementation of agile success factors in the Sri Lankan software organizations, finally determine the organizational agility of the Sri Lankan software industry by analyzing the level of implementation of the identified success factors in organization. Research does not consider whether an organization has implemented a specific agile methodology but consider general traits or practices that are "agile." Research was carried out by considering 9 main agile implementation success factors: Customer satisfaction, customer collaboration, customer commitment, decision time, corporate culture, control, personal characteristics, social culture, and training and learning. These factors are categorized in to two broad categories: Organizational factors and people factors. Overall research findings evidenced that organizational agility in Sri Lankan software industry is "Highly agile" with respect to organizational factors with more than 60% of average responses, and "Very highly agile" with respect to people factors with more than 80% of average responses.