Enablers and Inhibitors for Achieving Agility in Project Portfolio Management

Abstract

If an organization wants to be able to respond to the fast evolving business environment and customer requirements it needs to work on being adaptive or in other words agile. The last few years research has been explaining what an organization should strive for when it sets out to reap the benefits of an agile methodology on a project portfolio level. Different design principles are defined to reach design goals to set up an effective agile project portfolio management system. But there is no complete framework for agile project portfolio management at the time of this research. One of the things that is missing is a lack of evidence concerning antecedents that inhibit or enable the adoption of those design principles. Those antecedents or in other words enablers and inhibitors foster and hamper achieving agility in project portfolio management. This qualitative, explorative research documents evidence of thirteen enablers and seven inhibitors with the help of data gathered in eight different cases across eight different industries. One semi-structured interview was conducted, transcribed and coded per case. This research finds evidence that leads to belief that the body of knowledge needs to be expanded in order to fully grasp what is necessary to achieve agility on a project portfolio level. It provides elements on which an organization can reflect before starting initiatives to organize itself towards agile project portfolio management.

Date of Award	12 Jul 2022
Original language	English
Supervisor	Tim Huygh (Examiner) & Laury Bollen (Co-assessor)