One of the first definitions of the term “agility”, as a concept, was observed in the area of manufacturing, disseminated as “agile manufacturing”. According to Nagel and Dove (1991), a company with agile manufacturing would be capable of delivering new products quickly, assimilating market experiences and technological innovation easily and continuously and modifying its products to incorporate such experiences and new technology in its development processes.

In the area of project management, the term “agile management” became known from the development of a set of methods developed specifically for the area of software, such as Scrum (Schwaber and Beedle, 2001), Adaptive Software Development (Highsmith, 2000) and Extreme Programming (Beck, 1999). These methods were named “agile” or “lightweight methods”, and their creators got together and prepared a manifesto, which was called the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. Since then, several studies have been conducted on the topic of “agility”, and these methods have become known under the general acronym for agile project management (APM).

Amaral et al. (2011) define APM as an approach based on a set of principles whose purpose is to make the management process more simple, flexible and iterative to obtain better results in performance (cost, time and quality), less effort in management and higher levels of innovation and added value for the customer. Additionally, Conforto et al. (2014) provide evidence that the principles of agile management can be applied in different kinds of business. According to the authors, agility is the ability of the project team to change the project plan quickly and continuously in response to emerging customer needs, market demands and trends or opportunities to add value and deliver better results in an environment of innovative and dynamic business.
With this definition, it is clear that the “ability to change” is associated with the “project team”, which can be extrapolated as the team involved in the management of the project or process with which they are dealing. This team should be able to change the original plan quickly and continuously, aiming to add value and deliver better results in an environment of innovative and dynamic business.

RESEARCH METHOD

Action research was adopted for the development of the framework because this type of research aims to solve practical problems and contribute to science (Coughlan and Coghlan, 2002). The research team was composed of three researchers and professionals from the company identified in the text as EP.

The EP has been in the market for products in the area of civil construction for 73 years and is recognized for innovation and technology in the country. The organization is Brazilian and operates in the segment of consumer goods for civil construction. The organization has somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 employees in ten countries. It has a wide range of products (more than 15,000), including different process technologies and different types of polymers. Recently, the company opted to create an integrated strategy and established a group of people to generate an innovation strategy. TRM was the method chosen to carry out the undertaking. The document analysis indicated that the first roadmapping workshop was held, generating 600 ideas for products and technology, 20 per cent of which remained in the final roadmap.

The selection of the company was intentional. As it is a research-type intervention, it was necessary to find a company that had experience in the adoption of the technique and that faced the problem of roadmap updating. In addition, an opening was necessary to conduct the action research process. The chosen company met the requirements, and it was an organization that had experience in developing new products and technology.

The first step for the team was to collect data of the roadmapping process from EP. For this reason, a document analysis was conducted, and the first collection instrument was applied; it consisted of 13 questions that guided the interviews with professionals of the company. Managers in the areas of R&D, marketing and engineering were selected, as well as specialists in products and technology, for a total of 12 interviews. Each of the interviews lasted approximately 1.5 h, totaling about 18 h.

Next, there was a diagnosis of the roadmapping process, and some gaps were identified with respect to updating the roadmap. Based on the identified gaps and the difficulties of the company, there was a specific literature review of monitoring information and agility.