Application degree of agile project management principles in new product development projects in the fast-consumable food products industry in Turkey

The concept of agility and the concepts derived from agility such as agile project management, agile production, organizational agility, agile marketing, agile leadership, agile human resources have been an interest of both researchers and business managers for decades. Although the concept of agility first emerged in production companies in the industry, studies in the software sector have shown a very rapid development due to the suitability of the sector structure. Afterwards, the applicability of this method has been the subject of research and application in organizations operating outside the software sector and especially in the production of physical products. In the studies carried out in the world and in Turkey, the structure and functioning of the organizations were handled through these concepts, and also sectoral and regional studies were presented. In this research, a descriptive study was conducted to evaluate the product development processes of the organizations operating in the fast-moving food products sector in Turkey in terms of agile project management practices. The elements indicating that agile project management is being implemented were filtered from the literature. Considering the structure of the food industry, questions looking for the traces of each of these elements were prepared. A semi-structured questionnaire consisting of these questions was prepared and answers were collected from the project managers in the organizations. The obtained data were analyzed by descriptive statistics method. The extent to which agile project management methods are used in product development processes is explained in the sample.