Applicability of agile project management for construction projects

Abstract

Project management is today a current and highly discussed area. Projects within the construction industry are managed has not changed significantly during the last decades. The construction industry, the number of different actors and the way that projects are procured today has however changed. This has led to a gap between the managerial view on how construction projects should be conducted today and how they actually are executed. This is reason enough to question this conservative industry and look into what possibilities there might be in the future. Using agile methodologies have numerous advantages over the classical methods used in project management in construction projects. However, their characteristics make them appropriate to be applied to projects in other areas.Project management in the information systems industry has had a poor record of delivering value and has consequently seized upon the recent evolutional of agile project management.The meaning of the agile project management, from whence it originated and whether it has further applicability, are not widely understood. The construction industry also might benefit from the adoption of agile project management. A literature review has established that agile project management does indeed offer significant improvements and that the construction industry might also potentially benefit. In order to resolve to an agile theory, the underlying rationales for agile have been explored, leading to the identification of further promising research. The agile methodologies are suited for projects with high complexity and uncertainty. It is also suitable to work in agile ways when a project has unclear specifications, changing situations, complex project goals and results needs to be achieved continually or early in the project process.In order to this study is focused on establishing the possibility of applying the scrum method in construction project management. The compatible scrum framework is identified for construction projects as a result of the literature review. A case study is conducted by following the model outputs, and then reviews the possibility of establishing the scrum roles,meetings and artifacts. An expertise review is referred to validate and generalize the case study output to construction project management. Even though the case study highlighted the positive possibilities to establish scrum methods in construction project management, the expertise review is not positively resulted.