Agile Teams

Agile Teams

Agile teams are essential and omnipresent in the software development context as well as in the broader IT environment. Recently, there has been a substantial increase of organizations undergoing transformations to agile organizational structures. Among those, there are a lot of organizations that operate in industries and environments other than the “classical” IT context.

Agile methods promise a large potential for success, however they also come with challenges in various areas. These challenges emerge particularly on an interpersonal level, since the way collaboration and leadership are handled changes substantially: Agile teams bear more responsibility and are supposed to self-organize, the leaders’ roles and task profiles change, and customers are more strongly involved in the product and solution development process. As a research institute, we particularly focus on the so far rather underresearched interpersonal aspects of agile collaboration.

Illustrative research interests

• How can collaboration in agile teams be organized?
• Which employee competences are essential in agile teams and how can agile team members' competences be developed for working in agile organizational structures?
• How should the role of the leader in the agile context be designed and how does it affect the employees and the organization?
• Which factors drive the successful introduction of agile methods as new form of collaboration (in agile transformations) and which measures can be used to support this transformation process?

We are open to collaborate with corporations and study agile collaboration, agile leadership, and agile transformations based on state-of-the-art quantitative and qualitative research methods.

If you are interested in our research area “Agile Teams“ in general, please get in touch with Prof. Dr. Martin Högl (ilo@som.lmu.de).