Prioritizing agile project management strategies as a change management tool in construction projects

Managing changes play a significant role in enhancing the success of projects. Seeking a flexible mechanism to facilitate project management, which is more adaptive to changes, is the initial motivation for conducting the present study. Agile Project Management provides new opportunities for management based on the acceptance of change as an unavoidable ingredient of the project management process in the construction sector. However, applying all the agile solutions would need a tremendous amount of initial investment. Therefore, the present study aims to introduce and prioritize the agile enablers for the change management of construction projects. For this purpose, the most critical changes were identified through a questionnaire survey among 60 Iranian first-grade consultant and contractor companies in the field of construction. Subsequently, 12 experts experienced in the area of change management in construction projects selected the most appropriate agility strategies for facing the prioritized changes through semi-structured interviews. Based on the achieved results, the most effective agility solutions in the change management are: continuous resource monitoring & improvement, flexible workflow, client’s participation, facilitated communication, and receiving requirements during the project which accelerate responding to the changes through a repetitive and incremental process based on continuous learning and short-term planning.