In Pursuit of Agility: How to Transform Your Organisation's IT Project Selection Process

To remain competitive, many organisations are undertaking agile transformations in pursuit of agility. Information technology (IT) plays a pivotal role in supporting organisational agility; thus, it is essential that organisations select the right IT projects in a timely manner to deliver. In practice, though, organisations have struggled with effective decision‐making in the IT planning process, especially in competitive environments where there is a need for agile decisions. To guide organisations on how they can transform their IT project selection (ITPS) process to become more agile, we examine two large and well‐established Australian organisations and their digital‐only subsidiaries launched as agile organisations in start‐up style. We explain how the parent companies conduct ITPS and contrast this with the digital‐only subsidiaries, highlighting the strengths and challenges each approach presents for agility. We provide an ITPS agility framework that identifies five dimensions that can enable or inhibit agility. These are: ITPS funding approach, number of ITPS decision‐makers, granularity of ITPS work‐packages, frequency of ITPS process and duration of ITPS process. Our findings indicate that the traditional approach that the parent organisations have taken with these ITPS dimensions has inhibited agility, whereas the ITPS dimensions have been configured to enable agility in their digital‐only subsidiaries. We recommend that those responsible for agile transformations of ITPS within their organisations fund teams instead of projects, delegate ITPS decision‐making authority, make faster and more frequent ITPS decisions about work‐packages that are smaller in scope, and use agility in the right places, as ITPS does not always need to be agile.