Agile Process Consultation -- An Applied Psychology Approach to Agility
This addresses the need for situational approaches in agile project management as it spreads beyond software development, though it appears incremental by applying existing psychological theories.
The paper tackles the problem of implementing agile change in organizations by proposing Agile Process Consultation, which adapts applied psychology principles to help clients diagnose issues and make decisions, rather than prescribing specific practices.
An agile change effort in an organization needs to be understood in relation to human processes. Such theory and accompanying tools already existed almost 50 years ago in applied psychology. The core ideas of Agile Process Consultation are that a client initiating a change toward more agility often does not know what is wrong and the consultant needs to diagnose the problem jointly with the client. It is also assumed that the agile consultant cannot know the organizational culture of the client's organization, which means that the client needs to be making the decisions based on the suggestions provided by the consultant. Since agile project management is spreading across the enterprise and outside of software development, we need situational approaches instead of prescribing low-level practices.