Using Analytic Hierarchy Process to Evaluate Implementation Barriers of Agile Project Management in Australian Project Environments

摘要

In today's complex environments, projects are facing many challenges to being delivered successfully. Lacking appropriate change management, adaptation and transformation, disruptive technologies, competitive demand and supply, acquisition of scarce resources, and fluctuations of stakeholder and customer needs could become impediments in delivering successful projects. Agile project management (APM) is one of the project delivery approaches believed to be effective in creating responsiveness and efficiency for projects in achieving customer satisfaction, delivering high quality, productivity and project performance as well as accomplishing project goals. Nevertheless, the magnitude of non-traditional agile implementations in project environments can be at variations depending on methodology, sector and extent of agile practices. This research aims to identify and evaluate implementation barriers of APM in projects across different sectors in Australia. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) technique was employed to conduct the research analysis by organising and analysing the APM barriers across different industrial sectors in Australia. The research was designed in two consecutive stages. In the first stage, 15 barriers to agile implementation, as evaluation criteria, were identified and finalised by a panel of APM experts. The agreed barriers were organised into four categories of agile manifesto values. The second stage, 10 APM practitioners working in Australian projects were invited to analyse and rank the barriers to agile implementation. The results of AHP analysis include the pairwise assessment matrices of the studied categories and the overall rank of barriers to the APM implementation. The research findings aim not only at facilitating agile project practitioners to recognise the most important agile implementation barriers but also the contribution to the improvement of future APM implementation in Australian projects.