The 3 zones in the main diagrams used in the Agile Literature Review Approach (ALRA)

The 3 zones in the main diagrams used in the Agile Literature Review Approach (ALRA) are:

Zone 1: Environmental drivers: topics (e.g. factors, drivers or concerns) that are related to external and internal environments. As factors, drivers and issues, they exert much influences on certain organizational capabilities under examination, as relatively independent and nonmanipulable variables.

Zone 2: Organizational capabilities: topics related to certain organizational (both internal or inter-organizational) capability domains, such as innovation capability, managerial leadership competence, and supply chain management capability, etc..The prime attention is on their quality and competence status which have impact relevance to the organizational performance outcomes (e.g. financial/ non-financial and successfulness to cope with identified management concerns, and effectiveness of existing and potential organizational improvement initiatives.

Zone 3: Outcomes/ solutions: These cover both (i) outcome status on the organizational financial and nonfinancial performances and successfulness to deal with chosen management concerns and (ii) effectiveness of existing and potential solutions being considered to address the chosen management concerns.

The three zones are related in the sense, broadly speaking, that components/ factors in zone 1 influence components/ factors in zone 2; and components/ factors in zone 2 influence those in zone 3.

This is shown in the following diagram

Examples of components for the three zones are: 

Zone 1: Environmental drivers: Intensity of competition in the external environment; Customers becoming more demanding and sophisticated on service quality offered by the company. Internal environmental drivers could be the existing employee profile, e.g. ageing employees or millennial employees, and their job expectations.

Zone 2: Organizational capabilities: innovation capability, supply chain management capability, business intelligence management capability, and managerial leadership competence.

Zone 3: Outcomes/ solutions: (i) outcomes-related: return on equity, customer loyalty status, size of market share, staff morale status, employee commitment status, employee job stress level status, staff turnover status; and (ii) solutions-related (existing and new): service-automation project, flexible job arrangement initiative, and new e-service application.

Examples of management-concerns diagrams and theoretical frameworks are provided in other blog articles, thus not examined in this blog article.