In the context of informatization and digitalization of work the ability to work self-organized and agile become more important for workers. Education organizations are required to provide fitting training approaches for to fulfil those requirements. The paper contains a comparison and explanation of traditional (PMBOK, Prince2, Hermes) and agile project management approaches (Scrum, Kanban, Scrumban) and agile organization forms (OKR, Holacracy). The different approaches are explained, especially in the field of the agile approaches, in detail to provide a deeper understanding from the necessary requirements onto the workers. The work concludes with an aggregation of comparisons of both approaches and a conclusion for future requirements for teaching and learning and future necessary research.

1. Traditional and Agile Management Approaches
Knut Linke
09/06/2019
12th ILERA European Congress
Heinrich Heine University (HHU) Düsseldorf, Germany

2. Research project Open IT
 Research goal:
 Development and testing (Städler, von Zobeltitz and Linke 2018; Städler and
Seger 2018) of special study programmes for IT specialists with primary or
secondary IT training (Rogalla and Witt-Schleuer 2004):
 Inclusion of work experience within the study programm
 Programm should include future work requirements from the field of professional IT
work
 Research questions:
 How does the digitalisation and informatisation of work influence future work
requirements?
 Which kind of requirements needs to be considerate to qualify the participants
for the field of and associated management tasks?
 In order to design suitable training courses; which are the necessary
requirements from the perspectice of (project) management approaches in the
field of IT (related) work?
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3. Influence of Informatisation
 Society is changing from industrialism to informationalism; the global information
society (Castells 2001; 2003).
– Informatization in this context is understood as the process of generating and using information
(Schmiede 1996a: 27; Pfeiffer 2018: 344), mainly for commercial and business purpose.
 The informatization of the working world (e.g. Schmiede 1992; 1996a; 1996b; 2006a;
2006b; Schmiede, Baukrowitz and Boes 2001) leads in the long run to services and
production processes being increasingly provided decentralized, virtualized and
internationally (Boes and Kämpf 2006; Speidel 2012).
 The informatization of work and the working world is favored by the information
space created by informatization, which was created by the technology of the
Internet (Boes et al. 2014).
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4. Requirements of Informatisation
 Employees must be prepared for the future requirements of the work
environment; decentralized work and higher dynamics realized within the
framework of global and virtual project work.
 Changing working world (skilled) with a higher demand for innovation and
flexibility in the direction of customer and their needs.
 Agile management concepts become more important:
– Strengthen self-organization, less defined processes
– Increasing demand for personal labor capacity to fulfill the non-routine requirements
– Increasing real of subsumtion (Schmiede 1989) of social skills to fulfill the further
requirements (interaction and collaboration)
09/06/2019 - 4 -

5. Actual approaches (traditional)
 Follows the push approach:
– In push management, not only the goals come from above, but also the methodical
approaches to how a project is realized. This leads to the effect that a high planning effort
exists and only a little scope for individual employees.
– A high level of coordination effort prevails and adaptations to changed framework
conditions take place only slowly.
 Traditional approaches mostly involves the roles of project client, project
contractor, project sponsor, project steering, project management and
project team. Mostly controlled by project portfolio management for project
controlling (Kütz 2012).
09/06/2019 - 5 -

6. Actual approaches (traditional)
 Overview of the mostly common used traditional project management
(PM) approaches:
PMBOK (PMI) PRINCE2 Hermes
Objective Offer PM knowledge base
based on best practice
Provide PM
methodology for direct
application
PM methodology plus directly
applicable scenarios for the
application
Orientation Knowledge- and process-
oriented
Strong process- and
step-oriented planning
Clear guidelines for the planning,
management and implementation
of projects
Flexibility for
major projects
Focus on major projects Applicable for all
project sizes
Tailoring to different project sizes
is possible
Support iterative
approach
"Plan-do-check-act"
paradigm, is repeatedly
traversed
PRINCE2 supports
continuous optimization
The planning process must be run
through several times - agile
procedures possible
Project phases No requirements for
standard
Minimum set of phases
specified
Specifications of a (4) phase
model
Table 1 – Differences in traditional project management approaches (Moser 2019: 5)
09/06/2019 - 6 -

7. Critism on traditional IT work
 Berkun (2007: 214-215) explains IT employees are bothered by:
– being treated like people who have no idea or experience, have to stick to
templates, processes, meetings, reports or rules that are purely organizational
and cannot be influenced;
– lack of respect from supervisors as well as the consideration of personal
interests.
 Post-mortem analyses showed that projects fail not only because the
product or project is not completed, but also because customer
requirements or the market has changed (Serrador and Pinto 2015: 1041).
 A further problem of the hierarchical approaches is that dependencies and
deployment plans are done more positively than they occur in reality (Techt
and Lörz 2015: 81-83).
09/06/2019 - 7 -

8. Agile Approaches
 Motivation/elements of agile Approaches
 (Practical) advantages of agile PM
Important elements Versus Less important elementes
Individuals and Interaction Processes and Programs
Working Software (Solutions) Comprehensive documentation
Cooperation with the customer Contract negotiations
Response to changes Following a plan
Table 3 – Elements of agile development (Moniruzzaman and Hossain 2013: 5)
Advantage % Advantage %
Organization of changes 69 % Visibility of projects 65 %
Team ethics and morals 64 % Delivery time 63 %
Productivity 61 % Project planing capabilities 52 %
Table 2 – Advantages of agile project management (COLLABNET 2019: 8)
09/06/2019 - 8 -

9. Actual agile Approaches
 Agile Project management
– Scrum: Used for self organized collocated development teams. It begins with the requirements analysis
(user stories), which are integrated in the product backlog. The implementation of the backlog takes
place within the 4 Scrum meetings: Sprint Planning, Daily, Scrum Review and Scrum Retrospective
(Wintersteiger 2013; Erretkamps and Oswald 2014). Scrum distinguishes between three roles: Scrum
Master (problem solver), the Product Owner (customer view) and the Development Team.
– Kanban: used in project management for maximizing the throughput (Wille and Müller 2018) and
transparency. Core element is the visualization of work steps (Kanban Board) to enable team members
to inform themselves about current changes and status of the work, task distribution and processing
(Anderson 2011: 73-81).
– Scrumban: Combination of Kanban and Scrum
 Agile Management
– OKR: used in companies to structure target agreements across departmental boundaries and to
orchestrate them simultaneously and transparent, to ensure the visibility of goals and expected results.
Works will with Scrum, Scrumban and Kanban.
– Holacracy: "A structure consisting of self-regulating and interdependent, mutually influencing holons"
(Robertson, 2015).
06/09/2019 - 9 -

10. Example Holacracy
- 10 -06/09/2019

11. Traditional vs agile approaches
 The change from a process centered, linear frequency (traditional) to a function- and
people-oriented (agile) approach poses challenges for organizations:
Table 6 – Differences between traditional and agile IT management (Leau, Loo, Tham and Tan 2012: 165; Nerur, Mahapatra and Mangalara 2005:
75; Nerur and Balijepally 2007: 82)
09/06/2019 - 11 -
Agile perspective Traditional perspective
Target Adaptation, flexibility, responsiveness Optimisation
Environment Turbulent, difficult to predict Stable, predictable
Organizational structure Organic Mechanical
Management Leadership and Collaboration Command and Control
Focus Human-centered Process centered
Customer role Critical Important
Knowledge management Tactical Explicit
Development models Evolutionary delivery model Life Cycle Model (waterfall, spiral etc.)
Distribution of roles Self-organized teams Individual, privileged Specialization
Requirements analysis Iterative approach Detailed requirements profile
Modification costs Low High
Development direction Can be changed at any time Fixed
Testing After each iteration When the development has been completed
Customer interaction High Low
Project scaling Low to medium project size Extensive projects

12. Outlook
 Socioeconomic analysis (LCI Online survey; Deep Interviews; Observation):
– Agile and self organisated work compared to traditional working behaviour (3 cases;
additional individual interviews)
– Focus on conflicts, self-management, issues in working behaviour
– Acceptance of personal spaces and personal development
 Traditional (project) management is still a pillar for (global) project
management and especially for hybrid solutions (practical/measurable).
 Basically one of the challenges in IT project management is the real work:
Application of knowledge can conflict with the real work activity and deviate
from the real needs. This leads to a conflict between the real application of
the memorized knowledge and the resulting difference to the real work
situation.
09/06/2019 - 12 -

13. Conclusion & Reflection
 It is necessary for (agile working) employees to be able and to be allowed to
train themselves further in a team. This must be desired and encouraged by
the employer in agile environments.
 Trainings must include the mentioned skills to fulfill the social aspect for
agile work and consider fitting informal skills.
– Skills might be currently part of the labor capacity of the employee
– Skills must include knowledge about the theory
– Traditional, monolithic approaches must be considered as well
– Ability for mindful leadership and co-working as well fluid management might become a
human resource asset
– Self-management and (pro-active) handling of issues in working behaviour as well
09/06/2019 - 13 -

14. Conclusion & Reflection
 Agile work and management increases the requirements on social and soft
skills of employees: It must be evaluated which skills are necessary for
individual approaches (from a educational/scientifiy point of view).
 Open Question: How can this be transferred into educational practice (as
T-shaped tragning) in order to make them applicable and which methods
employees need for this (as professional part time study)?
– Important to ensure the developement of highly skilled (IT) professionals
– Certification based (uniform knowledge) vs. Practical integration
– Focus on or without focus on traditional university education (convertion of courses into
ECTS/acceptance of learnings for ECTS)?
09/06/2019 - 14 -

15. Thank you for your time
Knut Linke
Research Assistant
Hochschule Weserbergland
Am Stockhof 2
D-31785 Hameln
Phone.: +49 (0)5151 95 59-56
linke@hsw-hameln.de

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