Members of the Agile Research Network in collaboration with
a researcher from Sintef, Norway, organised the First International Workshop on
Agile Transformation, at XP2019, Montreal, May 2019.
In order to increase their ability to sense,
respond and learn, organisations are up-scaling their use of agile. Agile ways
of working are used in larger projects and also in organisational units outside
IT. The first international workshop on agile transformation, aimed to focus
research on practice in a field which currently receives great attention.
While the implementation of agile methods
traditionally has been studied at team level, adopting agile practices across
the organisation is widening this perspective and has been labelled “agile
transformation”. Research has discussed three main areas of such
transformations. First, challenges and success factors in the transformation
process; second, changes in roles and practices that occur during such
transformations; and third, models for understanding agile transformations. As
an emerging research field, there are many understandings of what agile
transformation is; also, current empirical studies tend to be descriptive and
place little emphasis on theory to explain findings. This was the motivation to
host the first international workshop on agile transformation.
The goal of the workshop was to challenge the
scientific community to identify what should be of prime interest to
researchers in the area of agile transformation, as there are growing
opportunities to study them as companies increasingly adopt agile .
The participants in the workshop proposed different
definitions for agile transformation as shown below; the terms ‘culture’,
‘reactive/responsiveness to change’ and ‘continuous improvement’ figured in
several of them.
Table 1. Some of the definitions of agile transformation
gathered at the workshop.
“an
individual’s, team’s, group’s and organisation’s journey into continuous
improvements changing the way we do business, meet our goals and overcome our
challenges by being more flexible, targeting smaller goals and providing
continuous delivery, feedback and learning the process which evolves an
organisation to be more reactive to changes in its environment”
“digital
transformation -> agile becomes larger (programs, portfolios) and more
important; also becomes more complex, needs alignment with other units that are
not traditionally agile; change in leadership and management”
“a
people-centred approach to improving business outputs in the context of its
environment the process undertaken to develop capabilities that will allow for
flexibility in responding to a changing environment and continuous improvement”
“a
path from adopting agile practices to establishing agile culture”
“transform
from rather rigid structures, processes and hierarchy to a more network
organisation with increased knowledge, understanding and collaboration across
boundaries to im- prove a company’s reaction to external change in order to
improve performance referring to effectiveness”
“shift
towards practices that enable organisational responsiveness”
“agile
– iterative, incremental, collaborative, effects/results/outcomes-driven
transformation – continuous improvement from where you are towards the Agile
values and principles”
Participants also ranked their motivation for agile transformation
after a scale taken from the state of agile survey[1];
the top three reasons were: ‘improve business/IT alignment’, ‘enhance ability
to managing changing priorities’ and ‘accelerate software delivery’;
Participants were also asked to rank success factors and
challenges presented (slightly modified from [1],
based on own knowledge of transformation projects. They ranked the top three
success factors to be: ‘changing organisational culture’, ‘leadership’ and
‘engaging people’. The top three Challenges were: ‘Hierarchical management and
organizational boundaries’, ‘Integrating non-development functions’ and
‘resistance to change.
This was a very successful workshop with attendants wanting
us to repeat it in future conference. This workshop showed that the research
community is interested in continuing studies on agile transformations, and
that there is a growing body of studies on which to build up. We hope the
initial research agenda developed at the workshop will inspire future studies.
[1] K. Dikert, M. Paasivaara, and C.
Lassenius, “Challenges and success factors for large-scale agile
transformations: A systematic literature review,” J. Syst. Softw., vol.
119, pp. 87–108, 2016.
[1]
https://www.stateofagile.com
