An Agile Approach to Project Leadership: Complexities and KSA Perspective

Abstract

The paper explores, through a review of literature, the complexities associated with the increasing need of taking an agile approach to leadership in managing projects. The paper aims to explore the Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities (KSA) required by project leaders to adopt an agile approach to leading their project teams. Project leadership in itself is complex given the wide range of activities it involves. In addition, agile is increasingly becoming a need in leadership style let alone to be used as a methodology to manage projects. The goal is to explore a modern approach to leadership formation when applying agile methodology from the point of view of leading project teams. A systematic literature review has been conducted on literature available from the last five years (2017-2022) to capture the complexities associated with agile leadership. Alongside the complexities, the knowledge, skills, and attributes required by a project leader implementing an agile approach to their leadership style have been studied. As a result, an effort to create a development approach to agile leadership has been derived based on KSA for existing project leaders who might be willing to adopt this new leadership style. The results of this research will aid project leaders to gain a strong understanding of changing landscape and provide an avenue to better support, guide, and coach their project teams with agility. The results will also inform future; leadership preparation courses in order to train new and upcoming leaders in the field of project management.