Why agility is needed in literature review? A note on agility.

A few years ago, I realized that there is a need to come up with an agile approach on literature review for my part-time MBA students doing dissertation projects. The reasons are clear: dissertation projects that more often than not involve case study research in a messy and evolving business context as well as under significant time and resource constraints on the students' part. Thus, an research investigation, to be worth researching on, requires an agile approach.

 My knowledge on the agile philosophy and methodologies comes from my teaching experience on the rapid application development in the Information Technology field and the agile supply chain in the supply chain management field. To me, to be agile means to be nimble, flexible and responsive. Agile practice in a project setting endorses utilizing evolutionary cycles of development and testing throughout the project life cycle. Other agile techniques that come to mind are: evolutionary prototyping, stakeholder participation, a flexible and responsive operational setup, effective on-the-go learning and adaptation, light-weight documentation, and a versatile SWAT team with an entrepreneurial and engaging mindset. When the agile thinking is adopted in literature review for doing dissertation projects, I come up with the agile literature review approach (ALRA). This literature review approach,  as anchored in agile thinking, employs the following tactics for business students throughout their dissertation projects, :

(1) Utilize an evolutionary prototyping approach to construct a management-concerns diagram to comprehend a set of chosen management concerns to bey dealt with in a dissertation project;

(2) Utilize the constructed management-concerns diagram to construct a theoretical framework,  consisting of a set of high-level-research tasks, to serve as an agenda to conduct the literature review.

(3) Conduct the literature review by searching, evaluating and synthesizing academic ideas, notably analytical academic ideas, in a spiral fashion, for the high-level research tasks as identified in the theoretical framework.

(4) Explore and refine research methods design to be mapped onto the theoretical framework in a spiral fashion.

To carry out these ALRA tactics well, the students need to have a keen learning and investigating mindset. I have also anchored the ALRA theoretically on critical systems thinking. As such the ALRA is not merely a method, it is befittingly recognized as a methodology.