Developing strategies to improve agility in the project procurement management (PPM) process

Purpose: The ability of an organization to observe varying demands and efficiently meet them can be described as agility. Project procurement management (PPM) in the past was stable as things did not change very often and were very predictable. Due to hyper-competition, less predictable market and exponential innovation, the existing PPM becomes very unstable which marks the requirement of an agile model to manage procurement projects effectively. The paper aims to discuss this issue. Design/methodology/approach: For achieving the improvements, various barriers to improving agility in PPM were identified from the literature and experts’ review, followed by obtaining quantified impacts of identified barriers from the experts using the Delphi technique. Finally, interpretive structural modeling along with Matrice d’ Impacts Croises Multiplication Appliqué an Classement analysis was used to analyze the interactions among barriers to prioritize and strategize their mitigation. Findings: As per the analysis, the lack of top management alignment and commitment, lack of digital strategy, lack of new technology competencies and inefficiencies of financial factors were the most critical barriers that would come across while improving agility in PPM for any organization. Industries should have a stable, well-established and supportive top management that has a vision for digital transformation along with upgrading the companies’ technology layer for automating most of the manual processes to have intelligent decision-making capability. Originality/value: Industries need to be agile in their operations for being more competitive and responsive to the market. PPM being the most critical part of the entire value chain needs to be agile in the first place. The strategies developed as an output of this research can be utilized by industries for improving agility in their business processes.