The Federated Computer Science Intelligent Systems (FedCSIS) Conference took place in Belgrade, Serbia from 8-Sep to 11-Sep, and I was there.
The Conference started on Sunday and ran through Tuesday. The Conference was hosted by the University of Belgrade, Faculty of Organizational Sciences. The venue was a very pleasant, modern building that was inaugurated in 2022. The University has a history going back to 1808 as a college and the Organization Science faculty was established in 1969. The Conference program included a tour of Belgrade and a river cruise. The city has a long, rich history. I recommend it as a travel worthy tourist destination. I had a fun time and met people from many countries: Serbia (of course), Poland, Germany (lots of Germans), France, Italy, Bulgaria, Romania, Finland, Hong Kong, Indonesia, USA.
The onsite Information Technology for Business and Society (ITBS) and Information Systems Management (ISM) streams were on Sunday; there were online sessions on Wednesday. The presentations covered a wide variety of topics. For example, the evolution of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) success factors over time, frameworks for evaluating research on system design, and methods for evaluating product reviews. The plenary sessions were also a very interesting mix of theoretical and practical insights. The panel session on Sunday included industry representatives and showed that the artificial intelligence transitions is in full swing with corporations redefining job descriptions.
My topic originated based on my hunt for defining and delivering project success. What I see in practice is that almost all projects follow an agile methodology. Mostly they use a digital task board (Jira, Azure DevOps) and some or all elements of the Scrum framework (daily standup, iteration planning, reviews, retrospectives). I can confirm that there are huge benefits to multi-disciplinary, cross-functional, regular communications. I am pretty sure some projects would never deliver without these practices (i.e. fail). On the other hand, some projects still struggle to deliver with these practices. Thus, where I am less convinced and lack proof, is do these methods deliver better or more business benefits than traditional/waterfall methods.
To investigate this question, I drafted the research paper. The paper identifies the mechanisms—actions, decisions, or entities—that enable agile and plan-driven projects to deliver target benefits. Then it applies the real options framework to quantify the economic impact the decisions would have on a project. A real option is a right (but not an obligation) to invest in a real asset in the future. The concept is derived from but differs to financial options used in the stock market.
The idea is to have a way to determine what about the project will deliver the target benefits. Then, compare different project practices to determine and quantify the economic impact of those practices on the project outcome. For example, if the project is abandoned earlier than planned what does that mean in economic terms.
The article lays out all the components, formulas, and calculations for the framework and provides an illustrative case. You can find the paper here: Real options analysis framework for agile projects .
If you want me to apply the calculations to your project, drop me an email.
In addition to this paper, we have written a few times about agile practices. You can find some examples here: