Merging design thinking and agile development to support the evolution of project management inside Digital Accademia (part of H-FARM S.p.A.)

Design Thinking has caused a lot of commotion in the Management science in the last two decades. So has Agile Development, when its fundamental principles have been recognized as of great value even outside the software world. While many companies are rushing toward the adoption of one rather than the other, small discussion about how they relate together has been done. What do they have in common? How profoundly different are they? Could they be merged in a whole approach? Or should they stay independent and adopted in diverse moments of a problem-solving process? Lack of answers creates an empty space in the literature, while few realities that have experimented in this sense offer precious cases to be analyzed. This research tries to add another case to the list while trying to answer to those fundamental questions. In the chapters of the research, the case of the company Digital Accademia by H-FARM is showed: a reality caught in the moment of a rapid evolution from a startup-rooted nature to an established enterprise, an evolution that led to the rise of criticalities in the approach to projects. To find an answer to the emerged critical issues, the company has offered a priceless field for experimenting the merge of Design Thinking and Agile Development as unique, seamless approach. The company is first presented, then analyzed under the lenses of Design Thinking and Agile methodologies, and finally explored through the experimentation of a new merged approach able to solve its issues. From this experimentation, important reflections are drawn so to provide inputs for further and deeper explorations of the merging of the two worlds.