Abstract:

The concept of agility in project management has emerged to enhance traditional project management methodologies that are sequential and linear. An agile project includes planned processes as well as iterations. In global competitive environments, obtaining agility in outsourcing processes allows the companies to handle the changes and dynamic issues. In today's COVID-19 pandemic conditions, the importance of agility concept increases compared to the preCOVID-19 pandemic period. In addition, providing agility in outsourcing processes enables to overcome the changes in the competitive markets and dynamic problems. In this study, intuitionistic fuzzy COPRAS method, which aims to obtain a solution relative to the ideal solution, is used to rank agile outsourcing provider alternatives and identify the best performing one among them. Intuitionistic fuzzy sets are used to deal with loss of information and hesitation in data that may occur in operations with fuzzy numbers. The application of the proposed intuitionistic fuzzy decision-making approach is illustrated by conducting a case study for an outsourced information technology-based project in Turkish white goods industry during the COVID-19 period. For that reason, five provider alternatives are proposed, and 13 evaluation criteria are utilized. The applied decision approach provides including intuitionistic fuzzy numbers into the decision framework for expressing experts’ opinions, hence hesitation is computed. The proposed decision model integrates the effects of COVID-19 pandemic on the agile outsourcing provider evaluation/selection framework.