The Agile–Stage‐Gate Hybrid Model: A Promising New Approach and a New Research Opportunity

Abstract

Agile development methodologies have been widely employed in the software industry, where they have been found to yield positive results. But can these new methods, with their new tools such as sprints, scrums, burndown charts, and backlogs, really be integrated with the traditional and popular Stage-Gate approach and then applied to physical products? Initial but limited evidence suggests yes: Larger IT firms have already integrated Agile and Stage-Gate and gained the benefits of both approaches; and most recently, a handful of manufacturing firms have employed this Agile-Stage-Gate hybrid model for physical new products. And if recent evidence can be trusted, this new approach promises to be the most significant change to our thinking about how new-product development should be done since the introduction of today's popular gating systems 30 years ago. The benefits of this hybrid model are a faster and more adaptive response to changing customer needs, better integration of voice-ofcustomer, better team communication, improved development productivity, and faster to market. A case example from a toy company, LEGO, is provided as an illustration. But there are negatives as well, and additionally, manufacturers must make modifications to Agile in order to adopt it successfully. Although initial results appear promising, much research is needed to explore this new Agile-Stage-Gate hybrid model, and many research challenges remain.

Unintended Side Effects of the Digital Transition: European Scientists’ Messages from a Proposition-Based Expert Round Table

“…Therefore, the mostly longstanding process was often hardly adaptable to any kind of change in the customer's needs. To handle those uncertain requirements in today's volatile and changing market environments an agile product development and an agile production are inevitable [80,81]. The customer should be effectively included in the process and quick early-stage-prototypes should be used to test functionality and customer satisfaction.…”

Agile Beyond Software - A Study of a Large Scale Agile Initiative

“…While in software a higher extent of all tasks could be carried out of by a number of the team members, for example testing the software, the tasks in mechanical engineering teams are allocated more individually because of the higher competence diversity. This requires the sprint planning, with prioritized tasks, also to be on a more individual level as also discussed by (Cooper and Sommer, 2016). Finally, this paper aims to contribute to the discussion on how to apply an agile methodology in large organizations developing both software and hardware.…”

“…Abbas et al (2008) argue that although agile methods have been around that long, they have not been given due attention until the emergence of the agile methods after 2001, when the agile manifesto marked a turning point in the attitude towards agile methods. Recently, Cooper (2016) and Cooper and Sommer (2016) contrasted agility with a classical stage gate process which in essence can be considered a waterfall strategy. Cooper is often attributed the formulation of the stage gate process (Cooper, 1990).…”

“…In their effort of merging the two (seemingly contradictory) concepts, they identify a complementing relationship between the two, where the gated process is on a macro-level, supporting management in taking strategic decisions on what projects to prioritize and the agile process is on a micro-level supporting the development team in taking tactical and operational decisions on what to prioritize within the projects (Cooper, 2016). While their overall evaluation is that stage-gate and agility are not incompatible, they do identify two main challenges related to using a software-accented agile strategy in the development of a physical product (Cooper and Sommer, 2016); 1) Defining a done sprint. Defining a sprint and the conditions for whether the sprint is done or not seems to be substantially more difficult in hardware development.…”

Reconceptualizing Design Risk Management as a Learning Strategy

“…(Rossberg, 2016) provides a set of agile metrics for project management and software engineering processes which can be applied as burndown charts of uncertainty and risk tracking and reduction in innovation projects. According to (Cooper and Sommer, 2016) there are important new research opportunities and potential in applying principles such as burndown charts as well as other agile risk and uncertainty methods (Moran, 2014) …”