Agile Project Management Practices in Palestinian IT Companies: A Managerial Framework

Palestinian software sector is directly affected by global trends of technology. Palestinian IT companies try to stay in the arena of competition. Agile project management (APM) is an emerging approach in software engineering, initially proposed and promoted by a group of sixteen software professionals who practice a set of methods, and share a common set of values of software development. They consolidated their thoughts, and defined these methods as “agile. This research aims at assessing the APM practices in Palestinian IT companies. This study aims at investigating the possibility of achieving the benefits of agile project management in software development through using agile project management practices. This study explored related topics to APM. Based on what the researcher had got from the literature, he assessed the APM in software development sector by analyzing the readiness of APM implementation including changes required, challenges and risks in addition to testing the 12 agile principles and agile success factors by using mixed methods methodology, qualitative and quantitative research tools, and all of these 12 principles and success factors were found in literature. A questionnaire was the quantitative tool, whereas, the qualitative one was conducting interviews in Palestinian IT companies. Quantitative data was analyzed by the SPSS program to generate descriptive statistics required and to test a number of related hypothesis. However, the qualitative data was analyzed using the thematic analysis approach. The questionnaire was designed to simulate the project’s success factors and agile project management practices in software development and information technology sector. The interview questions have been formed in accordance with the questionnaire which examines the hypotheses of the study, where it supports the research results through the answers provided by experts in the field of agile project management practices through their answers to the questions asked in interviews Protocol, and distributed to the sampled companies. Palestinian Information Technology Association (PITA) is considered as the official body which include all IT and software development Palestinian companies. According to PITA, the population size is 80 companies that are working in SW development sector according to many activities. The sample size was 67 based on population size, confidence level is 95%, and confidence interval is 5%. The results show that there are indicators that prove that the Palestinian IT companies have a high degree of agile implementation process in most aspects such as dealing with the change required, welcoming to change, focusing on customer centric, giving high attention to the team and its characteristics, and daily administrative procedures. However, the results show that Palestinian IT companies are lacking required level of ability to deal with challenges and risks of the APM processes and people characteristics readiness. The study indicates that eight of the nine hypothesis have statistically significant relationship with success. A framework was developed by the researcher as the main output to enable Palestinian IT companies to properly adopt the principles and the practices of agile project management that can enhance APM processes implementation. The value of this research is the introduction of an APM enhancement framework that can help the Palestinian IT companies to facilitate SW development process, and encounter the daily obstacles that to be solved, and to get rid of the suffering of IT sector, which opens the door for more creativity in Palestinian IT sector.