Benefits and challenges of APM in non-software development projects . 20

Tomas Gustavsson (2016) from Karlstad University in Sweden has conducted a recent and systematic literature review titled Benefits of agile project management in a non-software development context –A literature review. This literature review systematically looked at cases were APM was used outside a software development contexts and identified experienced benefits and challenges of using APM. Figures 1 and 2 on the next page are taken in original format from Gustavssons (2016) paper and show the reported benefits and challenges that were identified in the 21 cases studied by Gustavsson.

Figure 1: Reported benefits from the cases studied (as shown in Gustavsson 2016: 7)

Figure 2: Reported challenges from the cases studied (as in Gustavsson 2016: 7-8)

In summary, the four main benefits reported related to team collaboration, customer interaction, productivity and speed, and flexibility/coping with change, while the two

main challenges are changing the mindset to allow flexibility and lack of process visibility. In comparison to the number of benefits there were few challenges reported.

Gustavsson acknowledges that the results are initial and need more backing before generalizations can be made. (Gustavsson 2016: 7-9.)

2.4. APM in different industries

This sub-chapter aims to shed light on in which industries APM is used and more importantly in which functional areas APM is in use within these industries. Several large surveys show that agile project management is spreading outside the software industry. However, these surveys do not always state what types of projects APM is used for within these industries which is good to keep in mind when reading these statistics. In this sub-chapter results from two large international surveys are presented and compared.

The 10^th annual State of Agile™ survey is a commercial survey that is conducted by VersionOne Inc. a commercial company that produces software that supports agile methods (VersionOne 2016). The survey had around 3880 respondents (VersionOne Inc.

2016: 2.). It is good to keep in mind that this study is produced by a commercial organization, with possible interests, and not by an academic institution. Another large survey is The 2015 State of Scrum Report that is published by the non-profit association Scrum Alliance (Scrum Alliance 2015). The 2015 state of Scrum Report had 4452 survey respondents in 108 countries (Scrum Alliance 2015: 2). While the study by VersionOne (2016) presented above researched the use of agile, The 2015 state of Scrum Report is mainly targeted at researching the use of Scrum, with 95% respondents saying Scrum is their organizations agile approach. Interestingly when asked which agile approach(es) were used this survey allowed multiple answers and this showed that 54% of respondents organizations use Scrum in combination with other practices while 42% exclusively use Scrum. The report however did not reveal if they were used

simultaneously or in different teams, since the question was on an organization wide level. (Scrum Alliance 2015:10).

Figure 3: Employment of respondents according to industry, a comparison of results from two surveys (Figure based on statistics by Scrum Alliance 2015: 9 and VersionOne Inc. 2016: 5)

The respondents of The 10^th annual State of Agile™ survey worked in the following industries as also shown by figure 3 above: Software (26%) Financial Services (14%), Professional Services (11%), Healthcare (6%), Government (6%), Insurance (4%), Telecom (4%), Retail (3%), Manufacturing (3%), Media and Entertainment (3%), Internet Services (3%), Transportation (2%), Consumer Products (2%), Utilities (2%), Public Services (1%) and Others (10%) (VersionOne 2016: 5).

The respondents of The 2015 State of Scrum Report are employed in the following industries as can also be seen in figure 3 above: Information Technology (29%),

Finance (12%), Other (12%), Healthcare (6%), Consulting/Training/Coaching (6%), Government (6%), Telecommunications (6%), Insurance (5%), Education (4%), Manufacturing (3%), Retail (3%), Media and Entertainment (3%), Research and Development (3%), Transportation (2%) and Automotive (2%) (Scrum Alliance 2015:

9).

Interestingly, the The 2015 State of Scrum Report also asked which functional area within their organization respondents worked within, and the results showed that roughly one fifth of the respondents worked outside software development and IT, more exactly Product Development (11%), Other (5%), Operations (3%), Sales and Marketing (2%) and C-Level (1%) (Scrum Alliance 2015: 7.). To summarize some results from the survey: 29% of respondents work in the information technology industry, however when it comes to functional areas, as much as 44% of respondents work with software development and 33% with IT (Scrum Alliance 2015: 9, 7.). This shows that although the Scrum framework has spread to new industries, the functional areas within which it is used in these industries are still mainly software development (44%) and IT (33%). However, roughly one fifth of the respondents work in functional areas other than software development and IT, and this is an interesting trend to follow. As the use of agile methods is present in various industries it is likely that it will spread to new functions within these industries. Perhaps in the future an increase in the use of agile methods in functional areas other than software development and IT can be seen.

One thing to note is that these results are in percentages, that is comparisons, so as long as the popularity of the methods rise similarly within all work areas a difference cannot be noted in the statistics. If the number of respondents in the survey increases and the percentages stay the same this could indicate that there is an increase in the number of teams adopting agile methods within all functional areas, or it could simply mean that the popularity of a particular survey has risen. Statistics can give an indication of the state of things, however there are many factors that need to be taken into account when evaluating statistics and forming a picture of reality based on them.