Competencies for Managing Activities in Agile Projects

The management of activities in an agile environment takes place in iterative and incremental processes, in which people from the development team and other project stakeholders effectively work together to understand a given problem, in addition to keeping priority to activities with the greatest business value for the client. This article aims to understand the competencies of an agile team for managing activities in an agile environment. The systematic literature review was performed by using the Web of Science and Scopus databases, in which 1035 articles were found after the application of filters and criteria for inclusion and exclusion. Next, 320 articles were left for full and in-depth reading, which resulted in 126 articles considered to be valid for research. The articles were categorized by using Excel spreadsheets in order to group the findings and allow the comparison of categories. The results demonstrated four categories regarding (1) competencies, (2) tools, (3) relationship with the activity, and (4) characteristics of the development team. It was also highlighted that the technical competencies of the development team must be used in new tools. As for iterations, it is also necessary to promote a process of managing interpersonal competencies to ensure engagement and the ability to communicate effectively with business people and project members. A model is presented that can be used as a tool to support the planning of activities in an agile environment. The development team must have competencies for using new tools during iteration, given the complexity existing in each activity and the critical relationship of each activity with the finalization phase of the iteration.