Examining the transition to agile practices with information technology projects: Agile teams and their experience of accountability

Proponents of the agile approach to project management describe this new way of working as more efficient, more productive, liberating, and one in which the team has greater control. We examine the experience of implementing agile practices within project management through nine agile teams in the financial services sector. Using grounded theory analysis of data from semi-structured interviews, several thematic categories emerge including accountability, team-based perceptions of their place in the organization, human factors in agile teams, and technical factors with the implementation of agile practice. As a result of these findings, we propose a framework describing how IT project teams experience accountability arrangements when tran-sitioning into agile practices. The accountability experience is a result of the fit between the teams' perception of how they are viewed as agile teams in their organizations, their experience of technical practices of agile implementation, and their experience of interaction and exchanges in their teams. We conclude with a call to-wards recognizing the dissonance between different expectations of accountability and a call for further empirical research into this phenomenon.