The three pillars of sustainability and agile project management: How do they influence each other

Abstract

AbstractCompanies face new challenges needing to find ways to stand out from the competitors. All companies face new projects, which need to be managed assertively and faster, launching new products on the market ahead of competitors. This strategy requires enormous dexterity and agility within teams, which are increasingly multifaceted, multidisciplinary, and multifunctional. However, teams need to conciliate apparent freedom for creation with the sustainability rules, which are increasingly demanding, such as legislation and image that companies want to pass on to the market in terms of corporate social responsibility, ensuring a sustainable development of the companies. The goal of this work is to investigate and correlate agile project management and sustainability, taking into account that there are strong relationships, as well as to learn how agile project management affects organization's social, environmental, and economical dynamics from the triple bottom line standpoint. The research examines how agile project management ideas are connected to the triple bottom line concepts based on the literature. The framework was based on the theoretical assumptions underpinning the present research. The basic structure of the developed framework is based on the framework of a matrix‐based method for ordering and synthesizing data. Thus, network diagrams have been developed reproducing the links existing in the literature, both explicitly and implicitly. However, they were deeply expanded considering links not previously referred in the literature. An explanation about these new links is also provided, justifying their inclusion. Hence, the new diagrams offer a more complete landscape about how the adoption of agile practices in project management can improve sustainability in its different aspects, and vice‐versa. The findings reveal that implementing agile project management induces direct effects on an organization's social, economic, and environmental dynamics of the companies, as well as in their teams, with a favorable effect on all of them.