Executive Summary
This report examines a review of Complex Adaptive Systems used by Telstra late concerning the literature review on “Portfolios of agile projects: a complex adaptive systems’ agent perspective” by Sweetman and Conboy, 2018, focuses on the organization’s management sector’s performance and how the application of agile project management can be utilized by the organization. Shareholder returns through dividends, share price growth, and investment performance can contribute to the company’s goal if agile project management is implemented correctly. Moreover, recognizing the business profile and analyzing suitable management ratios gives a comparison of approaches between previous performance and future predictions. In terms of capital allocation, profitability, and inventory management, Telstra is a well-established, mature, and slow-growing firm. The peer-reviewed research article has proven helpful in our organization because the principles, benefits, and drawbacks of agile project management can be valuable to the Telstra project management office.
Introduction
Project management refers to applying experiences, processes, skills, techniques, and knowledge to meet particular project objectives within agreed-upon boundaries while adhering to the criteria of project acceptance. A business report is an essential aspect of an organisation’s management. Telstra corporation must retain its business reports to examine and track the company’s success (Li and Wang, 2019). The company’s business report informs its stakeholders of its present business situation, revenue-generating capabilities, and future sustainability prospects. This business study aims to provide a critical analysis and evaluation of Telstra, Australia’s most extensive telecommunications and media firm, concerning an article on Portfolios of agile projects: A complex adaptive systems’ agent perspective. The corporation provides information services and telecommunications to individuals, communities, governments, and businesses internationally and within Australia. This report will review the relevance, strength, and weakness of Sweetman and Conboy’s 2018 work on Telstra Corporation Limited’s management.
Organizational Context
A project management office (PMO) refers to a department inside a company that establishes and maintains project management standards. The project management office is in charge of creating protocols and methods to help with operational processes: everything should run smoothly. My report applies to all projects within Telstra corporation, where I will relate the management of the sectors of the company to that of the literature article. Even though agile methodologies can be quite productive on a project level, they need a lot of flexibility and add a lot of complexity at the level of the company’s investments (Cooper and Sommer, 2018). This has shown to be extremely difficult; little study has been done on administering agile projects portfolio. Little information suggests that the agility level of the portfolio can be accomplished by upscaling of agile methodologies at the project level, like Scrum. This study employs a CAS lens to critically evaluate the current management of portfolios in an agile setting, concentrating primarily on the features of projects as agents in portfolios designated for CAS. Concerning the same management issue that plagued Telstra Corporation, the issue may be addressed by referring to an article in which an interview of 30 experts was performed to produce 16 proposals based on CAS for efficiently managing agile project portfolios. A research agenda was also established and discussed the distinctions between an approach based on complex adaptive systems to the management of all the Telstra Corporation portfolio and traditional methodologies.
Literature Review
Agile management is a project management method originated by Japanese manufacturers and is now utilized globally in various companies for the development of software development. According to Loiro et al. (2019), an agile tool functions as an iterative approach to the development of various projects that are reliant on software development, which emphasizes continuous deployments and customer feedback at each iteration in most companies. According to Sweetman and Conboy (2018), the advantages of the 2016 agile version are well established, revealing remarkable increases like the enhanced capacity to handle shifting priorities to about 87 percent, 85 percent better productivity, and 84 percent of improvement in invisibility.
The field of telecommunications is subject to continual, quick, and cardinal change in global practice; in this sense, according to Haeruddin et al. (2020), Telstra Corporation’s dynamic follows worldwide trends. The essential qualities of agile project management satisfy the needs of project management in today’s telecommunications sector, and they are likely to achieve the desired operational results. Agile project management is a logical project management style that has shown success in the telecoms sector during its worldwide revolution (Bergmann and Karwowski, 2018). Telstra Corporation Limited is still on the verge of transitioning to a new stage of development – the information society and integration into the global information space – and is still at the beginning of the road to significant changes. In the Telstra Corporation, agile project management appears to be a successful project management metric. The expansion of Australia’s communications and information infrastructure is seen as one of the most critical aspects of the country’s economic and intellectual progress.
The management of many projects with shared resources to achieve strategic alignment and optimize economic advantages is known as project portfolio management (PPM). PPM is essential for aligning projects with corporate strategy, allocating resources effectively, achieving business value, and managing any risks. When discussing agile and PPM in this study, the discussion is not about expanding agile project methods like pair programming to the project portfolio level. Instead, the discussion is about managing project portfolios that include several agile initiatives. While agile methodologies lower the likelihood of failure of the project, they nevertheless make it more challenging to accomplish the project portfolio in which they are implemented.
Limitations of Agile Project Management
Even though the Telstra Corporation relies on Agile to handle some of its software projects, the methodology has been spotted to be associated with some disadvantages. Firstly, according to Sweetman and Conboy (2018), the method that is recognized as a Complex Adaptive System, results in a high amount of complexity in the portfolio whose management relies on Agile projects. This happens even though software projects seldom function in isolation and typically contribute to some more extensive portfolios. At the portfolio level, agile project management elevates the number of interactions (Buganová and Šimíčková, 2019). This is due to agile’s more fantastic customer-centric approach, which raises portfolio complexity by requiring agile projects to reconcile contradictions between the customer’s needs and corporate goals.
Secondly, agile project management increases interconnections inside and across projects, posing management issues at the portfolio level. These ongoing improvisations and interconnections, which might span hundreds of projects, resulting in a tremendously complex portfolio that is impossible to manage using a standard top-down portfolio strategy. Increases interconnections inside and across projects, posing management issues at the portfolio level. These ongoing interconnections and improvisations might span several projects, culminating in a portfolio that is tremendously complex and is impossible to manage using a standard top-down portfolio strategy.
Additionally, as much as Telstra Corporation, the project management team is still dependent on agile approaches; as explained in the article, our company is still disadvantaged because of the increased need for adaptiveness. Agile techniques’ iterative and dynamic character, along with agile projects’ intrinsic emphasis on improvisation, transformation, and self-organization, forces shift at the level of the project portfolio. On the left side of the figure, a series of plan-driven predictable activities can be observed. The direction and the governance of the portfolio have stagnated throughout time. On the right side of the diagram, we can see a collection of agile projects, which are being tugged in different directions. Directives from a demanding and diversified pool of clients and a set of sanctioned needs that are constantly changing. Each agile project wanders away from its original goal over time. While each project is unique, such intricacy and adaptability result from such achievement. If not managed properly, a project portfolio might become disconnected, confusing, and conflict.
With the problems mentioned earlier, the main reason for the article by Sweetman and Conboy, 2018 is to respond to the following query: What is the best way to manage a project portfolio to deal with the adaptiveness and complexity that comes with the agile project portfolios? The 16 propositions were produced from the six features of complex adaptive systems agents during the research based on the interview data. These propositions will aid in the identification of future study fields as well as give examples of research inquiries. Our analysis revealed that the qualities of complex adaptive systems correspond to the issues that project portfolio management practitioners encounter.
Limitations of the Literature
Although the study piece is trustworthy, it includes some common flaws in qualitative research in general and semi-structured interviewing in particular. In contrast to generalization, validity in interpretive research derives from the quality of logic in deriving conclusions; hence a robust study design was adopted, and much attention was taken in the execution and evaluation of the interviews. The list of suggestions, nevertheless, should not be construed as exhaustive.
Recommendations
I recommend the research work because it has some significant contributions to theory; for instance, it makes one of the first research to use complex adaptive systems to project portfolio management. It adds to the project portfolio management literature by conceptualizing projects as agents. Furthermore, with a set of 16 proposals, it fills a need to administer agile project portfolios. In addition, the research agenda for project portfolio management was defined as a result of the study. This research also influences practice by allowing practitioners to grasp better the consequences of administering agile project portfolios in dynamic contexts and by connecting complex adaptive systems theory to the actual world of agile projects and project portfolio management.
In addition, I recommend this article because it is a peer-reviewed source published recently, and thus the information it contains is of recent findings based on an agile project. As a project manager, the research article provides good guidance on how a company’s management team can utilize agile project management while effectively managing its side effects on the specialized sector. Therefore, the article is of high quality that can aid and guide the Telstra Corporation project management team while relying on agile as a complex adaptive system.
Conclusions
Most of the time, a company’s success relies on excellent execution and management of various company portfolios, as discussed by Sweetman and Conboy (2018). According to the two authors, the project management office at Telstra Corporation Limited is likely to be convinced by the authors’ proof. As a management team member, I have noted the weakness, advantages, and relationships that the concept of the literature shares with our telecommunication organization. For several years now, our managing sector has been utilizing the concept of agile projects, but we have never learned how some of the methodology’s limitations can be solved. As per the authors, a few limitations of agile project management were outlined such as complexity, improvisations, interconnections and adaptiveness. When Telstra Corporation Limited runs into such a problem, the company will be in a good position to solve or remedy the problem. Therefore, it is high time Telstra Corporation Limited should consider modifying its project management culture to effectively run its activities.
Reference List
Bergmann, T. and Karwowski, W., (2018) ‘Agile project management and project success: a literature review’, In International Conference on Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics (pp. 405-414). Springer, Cham. Web.
Buganová, K. and Šimíčková, J., (2019) Risk management in traditional and agile project management. Transportation Research Procedia, 40, pp.986-993. Web.
Cooper, R.G. and Sommer, A.F., (2018) ‘Agile–stage-gate for manufacturers: changing the way new products are developed integrating agile project management methods into a stage-gate system offers both opportunities and challenges.’ Research-Technology Management, 61(2), pp.17-26.
Haeruddin, M.I.M., Farhansyah, A., Haeruddin, M.I. and Mansur, M.A.R., (2020) We could be so good together. International Journal of Educational Administration, Management, and Leadership, pp.77-84. Web.
Li, B. and Wang, C., (2019) Corporate Social Responsibility and Contemporary Community Expectations. Asian Business Research, 4(3), p.74. Web.
Loiro, C., Castro, H., Ávila, P., Cruz-Cunha, M.M., Putnik, G.D. and Ferreira, L., (2019) Agile project management: A communicational workflow proposal. Procedia Computer Science, 164, pp.485-490. Web.
Sweetman, R. and Conboy, K., (2018) ‘Portfolios of agile projects: A complex adaptive systems’ agent perspective.’ Project Management Journal, 49(6), pp.18-38. Web.