Abstract
Consumers are constantly demanding products and services that are quick, innovative, and convenient. As such, organizations are forced to respond to these demands to retain customers and maintain their competitive advantage. Traditional Project Management (TPM) is the oldest practised approach used to drive product delivery. While it has its merits, in recent years, TPM has proven to fall short as the methodology of choice given its formal, rigid and inflexible nature. Due to this, Agile Project Management (APM) was developed to embrace changing requirements and faster turnaround times to deliver feature-driven products. For organizations to inherit ‘agility’, it meant that they needed to go through a transition to introduce the new methodology differing from their historical methods. Literature alluded to the view that the transition process remains unclear and not well understood, and as such, the adoption rate of APM has remained low. The purpose of this research is to uncover what an organization should do to successfully transition from TPM to APM practices, assess the challenges faced, the aspects affected as a consequence of the change, and lastly, provide guidance and recommendations. The study was conducted through a quantitative approach carried out through a survey questionnaire whose data were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics. The findings reveal that while organizations favour agile, they face several challenges in implementing it. Through these challenges, certain organizational aspects such as cultures, organizational structures are impacted. It emerged that while organizations find value in agile, they still cling to traditional approaches to run the day-to-day operations, which have a potentially negative impact on successful agile implementation because a traditional culture does not support or endorse agility adequately to ensure success. This is because daily-decision making processes that agile heavy relies on are still dependent on traditional driven techniques.