2. 2  Examine effects of using agile methods for creating Internet products on customer satisfaction and firm performance  Agile methods are informal, lightweight, and fast moving management approaches for creating Internet products  Characterized by early customer involvement, flexible processes, iterative releases, and self organizing teams  Traditional methods are formal, heavyweight, and slow moving approaches for creating mainframe software  Characterized by formal project plans, rigid processes, voluminous documentation, and firm requirements  Survey 400 managers to examine the links between agile methods, customer satisfaction, and firm performance  Results may help managers better understand the business effects of using agile methods

3. 3  Small, lightweight, closed-loop development processes  Ideal for creating Internet products and services  Consist of  Soliciting informal customer needs  Quickly translating needs into working Internet products  Releasing beta versions of products to customers  Soliciting early customer feedback  Repeating the cycle as often as necessary  Created to combat the spread of traditional methods  SW-CMM, CMMI, ISO, IEEE, and DoD standards  Ideal for powerful rapid prototyping languages such as HTML and Java

4. 4  Top 500 U.S. firms spend $140 billion annually on information technology  Much of the annual $400 billion U.S. defense budget is also spent on information technology  There are 250,000 information technology projects each year in the U.S.  As many as 72% (e.g., 180,000) of U.S. information technology projects fail or are failing each year  Two-thirds of U.S. information technology projects use agile methods to alleviate this high failure rate  $10 billion U.S. National Security Agency with nearly 3,000 programmers committed to the use of agile methods  Ultimately, managers need to know whether agile methods are linked to any measures of organizational performance

5. 5  Is the use of agile methods for developing Internet products linked to customer satisfaction and firm performance?

6. 6  Antecedents of agile methods go back 50 years (e.g., trust, self organizing teams, early customer involvement, etc.)

7. 7  Examine links between agile methods for creating Internet products, customer satisfaction, and firm performance  Design. Quantitative survey research of 400 software managers  Measures. A nine construct survey instrument with 36 items (using a five point Likert scale)  Analysis. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) for internal reliability and convergent validity  Results. Testing of the 16 hypotheses and construction of the final structural path model  Timeline. 12 month study to develop final proposal, collect data, and defend dissertation

8. 8  MIT Sloan School of Management  Microsoft from 1991 to 1995  Qualitative scholarly study  Lacks a theoretical model and quantification  MIT Sloan School of Management  Netscape from 1995 to 1998  Qualitative scholarly study  Lacks a theoretical model and quantification  Harvard Business School Study  15 Internet firms from 1995 to 1998  Quantitative scholarly study  Theoretical model, soft constructs, limited sample size

9. 9  32 major classes of software methods have emerged over the last 50 years (with hundreds of variations)

10. 10  Findings. Links between use of agile methods, customer satisfaction, and firm performance  Contributions. One of the first comprehensive empirical studies of the use of agile methods  Implications. Empirical confirmation or disconfirmation of validity of using agile methods  Limitations. May not be generalizable to all industry, organization, product, and service types  Threats to validity. Reliability and validity of research instrument, sample size, and response rate  Future research. Effects of other factors such as virtual teams, tools, groupware, culture, etc.  Recommendations. Whether or not to use or study agile methods for developing Internet products