Agile Project Management in Creative Industries: A systematic literature review and future research directions

The creative industries are facing tremendous changes due to fast development of new technologies, new stakeholder structures, more complex governance and a continuous demand for content due to new distribution channels. Despite these drastic changes, the creative industries want and need to preserve their cultural heritage to overcome volatility. A potential way for the creative industry to face these changes may be to transform creative projects towards agile project management. Due to the popularity and success of agility in project management in software domains, extant research details the benefits and challenges of agility and agile methods, but we lack a comprehensive picture of a possible integration of agility in creative industries. Therefore, this paper systematically reviews the literature on agility and agile methods in the creative industries and develops a framework that focuses particularly on the audiovisual industries such as motion picture, music, mobile and video gaming industry. Based on our framework, we identified eleven specific drivers of agile project management for the creative industries within our 31 paper. Overall, our results identify a significant potential for future research on agile project management in creative industries and emphasize agility as an ‘accelerator’ of transformation.