Application of agile to distance-learning professional doctorate programmes: A conceptual model

ABSTRACT

The doctoral journey is a complex endeavour, and like any complex project, deserves to be managed accordingly. Agile Project Management has been used successfully by practitioners in the Software industry for the last two decades and recently is being adopted in other industries, including in Higher Education. Based on the author’s personal experience, this autoethnographic paper discusses the situations in which a model based on Agile principles might be applied to doctoral research and thesis write-up and the ways in which it might make the process more predictable and successful. The model developed in this paper can be generalised at least in part to various types of doctoral programmes, where candidates and supervisors can benefit from risk reduction through incremental knowledge creation, continuous learning, and increased visibility into progress.

KEYWORDS:

• Agile project management
• DBA
• doctorate
• distance learning

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eugene Yamnitsky

Eugene Yamnitsky is a Head of Technical Program Management at Citrix where he spearheads Agile transformation and spends a big portion of his time on organisational design. He held senior leadership positions in Engineering, Product Management, and Innovation Management in established companies and startups. Eugene is actively involved in the Entrepreneurial community, where he is supporting multiple accelerators by leading workshops and mentoring early-stage startups. Recently he received the degree of Doctor of Business Administration with focus on Managerial Sensemaking and Organizational Ambidexterity from Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh Business School. He is currently teaching Product Management at North Carolina State University, College of Design.