Call for Papers – HICSS 48

We invite you to submit abstracts and manuscripts for the Agile and Lean Organizations: Management, Metrics and Products mini-track, to be held at HICSS-48 on January 5–8, 2015 at Kauai, Hawaii. Mini-track co-chairs are Jeff Sutherland (Scrum, Inc.) and Dan Greening (Senex Rex). HICSS is an IEEE Computer Society sponsored conference. Abstract and manuscript submissions received before May 1, 2014 will receive early guidance to improve the likelihood of acceptance. Final manuscripts are due June 15, 2014.

The Hawaii International Conference on System Science provides a great mix of academics, industrialists and consultants looking at many system science applications. HICSS attendees gain inspiration from innovators in a variety of fields.

We seek research papers and experience reports that describe how agile development and lean product management interact with organizations, their structures, cultures and products. What evidence-based guidance can we provide to leaders to help motivate, create and sustain agile/lean organizations? How do agile development and lean product management interact and support product groups, departments and companies? How do organizations restructure to support these philosophies and when they do not restructure, what happens? What cultural requirements and/or training are needed for companies to maintain agile behavior? How do organizations implement, monitor and improve coaching, training, mentoring and Scrum Mastering? What are the important metrics, and how do companies measure and improve? How do markets respond to rapid iterations and end-user experimentation?

Submit abstracts or full manuscripts for early review and guidance to improve likelihood of acceptance, to agilelean2015@senexrex.com. Earlier submissions will gain greater attention.

Submit full manuscripts for review. Review is double blind; therefore this submission must be without author names. Follow author instructions found on http://www.hicss.hawaii.edu/hicss_48/apahome48.htm, select “Software Technology” track and “Agile and Lean Organizations” mini-track.

Agile managers structure product development as rhythmic experiments to improve production. Agile is most often applied to software development, and we expect most papers in this mini-track to discuss software development. However, we also welcome papers that describe different types of organizational “production”, such as management initiatives, manufacturing, marketing, sales and finance.

Lean product management continually seeks to reduce waste, including waste due to producing unprofitable products (recently popularized as “Lean Startup” or “Lean Entrepreneurship”). Characteristics include: set-based design, A-B testing, unmoderated user-experience testing, direct market experimentation, customer validation and pivoting. Advocates claim lean product management produces greater market satisfaction and customer engagement, earlier discovery of hidden market opportunities, higher revenues and more efficient use of development staff.

These approaches claim superiority in new product development over traditional approaches (such as “waterfall management”) that make early development and market assumptions in long-range plans and rarely test those assumptions prior to release.

Experimentation lies at the heart of both agile development and lean product management: they identify leading indicators of progress (velocity, reach, engagement, loyalty, revenue, etc.), consider changes to process or product, construct hypotheses, and incorporate feedback loops to confirm or invalidate the hypotheses, perform production or market experiments, and rapidly adapt to discoveries.

Agile and lean approaches challenge organizations large and small. People typically conflate small failures (learning) with large failures (organizational threats), assume that innovation means taking long-range untested risk, and establish and protect budgets with many baked-in production and market assumptions. These cultural realities interfere with agility and real innovation.

As a result, companies invest enormous amounts of money in agile transformations that can succeed, but sometimes fail. What can organizations do to improve agile uptake? How do we know that the organization is improving? How can organizations diagnose problems without motivating gaming? What types of people are more likely to thrive in agile and lean organizations, and what roles should they take? What hiring practices result in better candidates? What training programs produce better results? What coaching structures work? How do we measure these activities?

There are two agile/lean mini-tracks in HICSS-48. This mini-track focuses on organizations and product management. The other mini-track focuses on software development practices. The mini-track chairs may redirect submissions that seem more appropriately hosted in the other mini-track.