Change Management : Critical success factors of product development in Agile

Sammanfattning: Agile has become a popular product development in IT services. The trend of moving from a product traditional development approach to Agile emphasizes the important of change management in Agile. This thesis answers, “what are the critical success factors for effective change management in Agile?”. This research question was formulated to produce a better understanding of change management, different types of change management such as incremental and transitional management and the critical success factors of change management processes in Agile. To study the importance of critical success factors in a practical perspective, this research applied the quantitative method of a self-completion questionnaire to collect data from a selection of IT organizations in Stockholm, Sweden. The selection included various sizes of organizations. Large (+250 Employees), medium (50-249 Employees) and small (10-49 Employees). Since various responsibilities are involved in Agile development projects, the target groups included a range of positions; project manager, OPO (Agile Product Owner), Agile Scrum Master, Developer, and Tester. This research found a set of twelve critical success factors which can be applied as a guideline on how to increase the effectiveness of change management processes in Agile. These factors are (1) Cementing the change, (2) Time management, (3) Communication (4) Initial success and motivation, (5) Project organization and responsibilities, (6) Helping people to help themselves, training, and resources, (7) Flexibility in the process, (8) Shared problem awareness, (9) Defining the vision and objective, (10) Comprehensive diagnosis, (11) Management coalition, and (12) Monitoring. Because change management is a fundamental and important part of movement to Agile, effectiveness is vital in increasing the project’s success. The success factors also have been also studied according transition management point of view. These twelve factors can increase the effectiveness of change management procedures from a traditional development approach to Agile. Furthermore, the ranking of the success has been studied to understand the difference proficiency point of views.