We seek research papers and experience reports that explore agile development, lean product management and agile/lean organizations. What evidence-based guidance can we provide to product leaders, managers and developers to help motivate, create and sustain better agile/lean behaviors and more profitable outcomes? How can we incorporate product design, architecture, engineering, risk reduction, budgeting and offshoring into agile/lean while preserving experimentation and adaptation? What common behaviors do we see in agile (including Scrum, Kanban, Extreme Programming/XP, etc.) teams and lean product management (including Lean Startup, Customer Development, etc.) and how do those behaviors affect outcomes? How do organizations and cultures restructure to support these philosophies and when they do not restructure, what happens? Which metrics help enterprises, teams and individuals adapt and improve?

Deadlines

March 15, 2015. Submission system available

Follow author instructions found on https://precisionconference.com/~hicss select “Software Technology” track and “Agile and Lean” mini-track.

May 15, 2015. Early review (optional) deadline

Abstract and manuscript submissions received before May 15, 2015 will receive early guidance to improve the likelihood of acceptance.

June 15, 2015. Submission deadline

Submit full manuscripts for review. Review is double blind; your submission must omit author names, credentials and affiliation. Follow author instructions found on https://precisionconference.com/~hicss select “Software Technology” track and “Agile and Lean” mini-track.

Background

Agile product development rhythmically experiments with development behavior to improve production. Agile is most often applied to software development, and we expect some papers in this mini-track to discuss software organizations and software engineering practices. However, we also welcome papers that describe other types of organizational “production”, such as business intelligence, management initiatives, manufacturing, marketing, sales and finance.

Lean product management experiments with markets to improve revenue, continually seeks to reduce waste, including waste due to producing unprofitable products (recently popularized as “Lean Startup” or “Lean Entrepreneurship”). Characteristics include: set-based design, A-B testing, unmoderated user-experience testing, direct market experimentation, customer validation and pivoting. Advocates claim lean product management produces greater market satisfaction and customer engagement, earlier discovery of hidden market opportunities, higher revenues and more efficient use of development staff.

Experimentation characterizes both approaches: they identify leading indicators of progress (velocity, reach, engagement, loyalty, revenue, etc.), consider changes to process or product, construct hypotheses, and incorporate feedback loops to confirm or invalidate the hypotheses, perform production or market experiments, and rapidly adapt to discoveries.

These approaches claim superiority in new product development over traditional approaches (such as “waterfall management”) that fail to test development and market assumptions in long-range plans.

Agile and lean approaches challenge organizations large and small. People typically conflate small failures (learning) with large failures (organizational threats), assume that innovation means taking long-range untested risk, and establish and protect budgets with many baked-in production and market assumptions. These cultural realities interfere with agility and real innovation.

As a result, companies often invest enormous amounts of money in incomplete or abandoned agile transformations. What can organizations do to improve agile uptake? How do we know that the organization is improving? How can organizations diagnose problems without motivating gaming? What types of people are more likely to thrive in agile and lean organizations, and what roles should they take? What hiring practices result in better candidates? What training programs produce better results? What coaching structures work? How do we measure these activities?

Possible topics for the minitrack include but are not limited to:

• Empirical outcome comparisons in industrial settings: agile and non-agile, remote and collocated, impact of different agile methods, etc.
• New frontiers in agile management – going beyond software development
• Forecasting, risk reduction, planning
• Agile organizations as rhythmic and recursive experimention
• Exploring the fit between agile organizations and their environmental context.
• Agile and Lean requirements engineering, dependency management and risk management
• Conflict in agile organizations and agile development teams: what cultures work and don’t work?
• What cultures and leadership characteristics lead to sustained agility?
• Evolution of agile organizations
• Case studies on agile management and experimentation, in atypical situations
• New approaches to teams and teaming
• Impact of tool use on agile management
• New approaches to teaching and coaching agile organizations
• Lessons learned in agile management
• How do agile management and traditional management complement or conflict?

We’re looking forward to seeing your submission, and seeing you at HICSS January 5-8, 2016 in Kauai!