Strategies to Improve Project Results Using Relational Capital in Agile and Hybrid Agile Software Development

ABSTRACT Improvements in Agile and Hybrid Agile project management hold immense potential, promising significant cost savings. These methodologies place the customer at the center of the software development process, providing valuable business insights and offering feedback, validation, and guidance. This continuous interaction between customers and developers fosters the accumulation of relational capital, which remains an under‐researched aspect of project success. We fill this gap by investigating the development of relational capital in software development projects using Agile and Hybrid Agile projects, focusing on the interaction of relational capital and project results. Our findings reveal a significant effect of relational capital on project outcomes in terms of cost, schedule, and quality, which will ultimately affect the relational capital's accumulation process in continuous feedback. The study offers a dynamic understanding of the causes and consequences of relational capital in the software development context, offering theoretical and managerial recommendations to enhance project results and potential future research avenues.