Understanding The Characteristics, Benefits And Challenges Of Agile IT Project Management: A Literature Based Perspective

TL;DR

This literature review explores the characteristics, advantages, and challenges of agile IT project management, highlighting its benefits over traditional methods and the organizational hurdles to its implementation.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive comparison of agile and traditional IT project management, emphasizing the challenges of adopting agile and suggesting a hybrid approach as a promising solution.

Findings

Agile methods offer more benefits than traditional approaches.

Organizational culture and team empowerment are key challenges.

A hybrid approach may be the most effective strategy.

Abstract

The objectives of this study was to bring out the understanding of the concept of agile IT project management; what it is and what it is not. It was also aimed at comparing the pros and cons of both agile and traditional methods of IT project management in a typical industry setting; the challenges of going purely agile, and so on. It is purely a review of literature of peer reviewed papers sourced mainly from Google Scholar. It was revealed that agile outweigh the traditional methods in terms of benefits, but its implementation poses a lot of challenges due to a number of issues, paramount among them being organizational culture and empowerment of the project team. This has resulted in a number of industries sticking to the traditional methods despite the overwhelming benefits of agile. In another school of thought, the combination of the two paradigms is the way forward.