Tobias Lieberum, a PhD student at the Chair of Operations Management, wins the 2023 Best Student Paper Competition of the College of Product Innovation and Technology Management (PITM) of the Production and Operations Management Society (POMS) for the paper “Should We All Work in Sprints? How Agile Project Management Improves Performance”. This is already the second prestigious POMS Best Paper Award for Tobias Lieberum, after winning the 2022 POMS CBOM Junior Scholar Paper Competition.

The 2023 POMS PITM Best Student Paper Competition welcomed papers related to Innovation, Product and Research Development, and Project and Technology Management. The award was particularly competitive this year with 38 submissions (a record for this competition). Each paper was first carefully evaluated by three judges in a first round, and the four highest-ranked papers were then sent to five senior judges for a second round of evaluation.

In the second round, Tobias Lieberum prevailed over three remarkable contributions from scholars at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, the Judge Business School of the University of Cambridge, and the Scheller College of Business at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The result was officially announced at the 2023 PITM Mini-Conference on May 21st, 2023 immediately preceding the 2023 POMS Annual Conference in Orlando, Florida.

Tobias Lieberum’s paper, published in the journal Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, shows: People spend too much time on early tasks when they are free to progress at their pace. Agile sprints mitigate this effect. The article was co-authored with Sebastian Schiffels of Augsburg University and Rainer Kolisch of the TUM School of Management at the Technical University of Munich.

The mission of the POMS College of Product Innovation and Technology Management is to create a closely-knit community of researchers, educators, and practitioners engaged in studying and disseminating issues that arise in the management of technology and new product innovation. Specifically, members are interested in examining the management of the creation and application of rapidly changing technologies as well as the development and launch of innovative new products.