Scrum for Product Innovation: A Longitudinal Embedded Case Study

Abstract

This article describes the tailored product innovation processes used in a partnership between Add Latent Ltd., an asset integrity and maintenance management consulting services provider in the energy sector and University of Salford. The challenge faced by the company is to make their inhouse expertise more readily available to a worldwide audience. A longitudinal embedded case study has been used to investigate how installable desktop software applications have been redesigned to create a new set of cloud hosted software services. The innovation team adapted an agile scrum process to include exploratory prototyping and manage the geographical distribution of the team members. A minimum viable product was developed that integrated functional elements of previous software tools into an end-to-end data collection, analysis and visualisation product called AimHi which uses a cloud-hosted web services approach. Field trials were conducted using the software at the Uniper, Isle of Grain power station in Kent, UK. Enhancements were made to the AimHi product which was adopted for use at the Uniper site. The product emerged from a Knowledge Transfer Partnership which was evaluated on completion by Innovate UK and awarded the highest possible "outstanding" grade. Extended periods of evaluation and reflection, prototyping and requirement refinement were combined with periods of incremental feature development using sprints. The AimHi product emerged from a technology transfer and innovation project that has successfully reconciled conflicting demands from customers, universities, partner companies and project staff members.

Mindful tourism: nothing left behind–creating a circular economy society for the tourism industry of Krabi, Thailand

“…A thematic analysis approach was employed to interpret the data (Attride-Stirling, 2001). Following Bass et al (2018), interview and focus group data and each study's documentation were repeatedly read before assigning codes. To reduce error and ambiguity, the codes were reread and grouped into themes.…”

“…Research design : To develop the theory of CE development, this paper employs a longitudinal embedded case design (Yin, 2017) that has been used for businesses by many scholars, such as Beverland and Lockshin's (2003) study of customers' desired value change within the business-to-business market and Bass et al 's (2018) study of product innovation. Four studies were conducted since the 2013 announcement of the Krabi Declaration to provide holistic, rich, and in-depth data on the progress of the CE.…”

Developing Innovative Integrated Business Solutions Using a Scrum Project Management Methodology

“…The dynamic nature of the software industry has forced provider firms to become more adaptable and agile in regard to designing solutions for evolving customer needs, similar to the requirements of IBS. Since the early 1990s, the software development industry has created a number of agile project management methodologies, all based on close customer collaboration, and frequent engagement, with rapid product iterations and constant feedback [6,7,12,[19][20][21].…”

“…Other researchers take the business model and process perspective and emphasize the importance of longitudinal customer relationship processes in developing integrated solutions [15,21]. From this perspective, the strategic importance of the client to the firm is of the highest relevance, and efforts to develop unique services and solutions should be focused on matching their needs.…”